…In the autumn of 1944, “she and her family kept a British paratrooper in their basement, the latest act in a series of defiances,” writes Den of Geek’s David Crow. “By the following winter, they too would be living down there, wary to even crawl out of ‘bed’ as the bombs fell on their small Dutch village of Velp.” Eventually, “after what was left of their food was depleted, they ate tulip bulbs. When those were gone, they ate the weeds.”

 

Endured at such a young age, this ordeal had lasting effects. “The deprivations would haunt Audrey the rest of her days, informing her svelte frame and, Matzen argues, possibly her early death from appendiceal cancer.” No wonder, then, that she remained fairly taciturn about her war even after becoming an internationally famous actress (an alternative to her first dream of dancing). Hence the formidable challenge laid before Matzen in the research that went into what became Dutch Girl: Audrey Hepburn and World War II, which you can hear him discuss in the Storytellers’ Studio video just above. Her story turned out differently from Anne Frank’s — which itself, as Matzen argues, beset her with a kind of “survivor’s guilt” — but now, both of them live on as icons of the twentieth century at its lightest and darkest.

Source: How Audrey Hepburn Risked Death to Help the Dutch Resistance in World War II | Open Culture