Audrey Hepburn & the Hunger Winter.
- Apr 6
- 2 min read
In the Netherlands, deportations began in 1942. Non-Jewish citizens were not left unscathed however. In addition to the 100,000 Jews who were deported, 550,000 young Dutch men were shipped to Germany to work, 50,000 Dutch people died due to inadequate health care, and 23,000 civilians were killed in air raids – all of this in a nation of 8.8 million people.
And so as we arrive at 1944, Dutch society has been trampled, and the worst was yet to come. As war losses mounted, the Nazis began to plunder Dutch industry. Tens of thousands of machine parts, electric motors, oil-refinery equipment, and the like were loaded onto trains bound for the Fatherland. In response Dutch railway workers went on strike, and in turn the Germans took over the rail system. Their retaliation for the strike was unimaginable – they simply stopped all food imports to the Netherlands. What followed became known as the “Hunger Winter” and years later one of its survivors would become world famous.
Audrey Hepburn was an 11-year-old living in Arnhem when the Nazis arrived to establish a base of operations there. She was a witness to the deportations of Jewish neighbors and watched as her own brother was taken away to labor in Germany. (Operation Market Garden in the fall of 1944, whom many may know from Band of Brothers, took place literally on her street.) She and her mother survived much of the war under constant bombardment, and she described the winter of 1944 this way, “We had no light, no heat, no water. We had no food because all the shops were closed. We ate what we could find. During the day we merely existed.” They survived on grass and tulips foraged from the fields with an occasional potato and broth. Despite all this, she carried messages for the resistance and raised money for them by giving secret dance performances until she became too weak to do so. Her family even hid a British soldier literally under the noses of the Nazis.
Arnhem was liberated on the 16th of April 1945 by a combined British/Canadian force. Audrey, now 15, was severely malnourished, unable to sit, her joints swollen with starvation edema, her eyes sunken, but still one of the lucky ones. Eighteen thousand people had starved to death that terrible winter.
Audrey Hepburn was one of countless Dutch citizens who received immediate food and medical care from the newly-arrived Allies. We know of course how this story ends – Audrey survived and thrived, despite the severe trauma of her girlhood, becoming an icon of style and grace throughout the world. It is no wonder, is it, that in the 1980s she became a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, devoting the remainder of her life to the care of starving children?
