War Child

“I knew the cold clutch of human terror all through my teens,” Hepburn once said. “I saw it, felt it, heard it—and it never goes away. You see, it wasn’t just a nightmare: I was there, and it all happened.”

In 1939, the Baroness misguidedly evacuated her daughter from Kent, believing she would be safer in neutral Holland. But in May 1940, the Nazis invaded Holland, and five years of hell on earth began.

Ferrer believes World War II was the profound experience that most shaped his mother’s life, and the horrors she witnessed make this thesis highly believable. Hepburn and her family survived firebombing, starvation, and daily terror. Her family’s money was confiscated; her favorite uncle, Otto, was murdered by the Nazis; shrapnel lodged in Hepburn’s neck, giving it its beguiling tilt.

One day at a train station, Hepburn saw Jewish families being transported to the concentration camps, an image she could never forget. She aided the underground resistance, delivering messages and pamphlets to those in hiding. While delivering a message to a downed British pilot in the country, a pair of Nazis came upon her and demanded to see her papers. Sweetly, Hepburn picked a bunch of wildflowers and presented them to the soldiers as a bouquet. Charmed, the soldiers left her alone.

Painfully malnourished, Hepburn also danced in Resistance fundraisers known as “black evenings” so secretive that the audience didn’t dare clap—they only smiled in the dark. “That expression—smiling in the dark—came to have such resonance for my mother,” Ferrer writes, “and it became a maxim for us all to live by and an example to follow.”

During the famine of 1944-45, known as the Hongerwinter, things got even worse. The family only had turnips and tulip bulb flour to eat. Hepburn almost died, suffering from jaundice, anemia, rheumatism, and edema. The extended van Heemstra family spent weeks in their villa’s bomb shelter until April 16, 1945, when the Canadians liberated the city of Velp. “That was the day I learned that freedom has a bouquet, a perfume all its own—the smell of English tobacco and petrol,” Hepburn later recalled. “Life began again.”