What Audrey Hepburn and Anne Frank Have in Common
Audrey Hepburn with Otto Frank and his second wife. Image by Luca Dotti
By Anne Cohen June 24, 2015
Anne Frank would have liked Audrey Hepburn. After all, her with the teenager’s movie star aspirations.
But the two actually share a much closer bond than you might think.
According to a new memoir written by Hepburn’s son, the actress was one of the first to read what would become “Diary of a Young Girl,” after the war.
“Two years after the war’s end, she received a manuscript [The Diary of Anne Frank], Dotti writes in “Audrey at Home.” “It was the diary of a young girl born, like my mother, in 1929, who had lived for two years hidden in a shelter set up behind a bookshelf in an Amsterdam apartment. Her name was Anne Frank. Reading the diary stunned my mother because, as she said, ‘That child had written a complete account of what I had experienced and felt.’ “
In an interview with People Magazine, he added: “My mother never accepted the simple fact that she got luckier than Anne. She possibly hated herself for that twist of fate.”
The photo above shows Hepburn posing with Otto Frank, Anne’s father, and his second wife in Bürkenstock, Switzerland.
The memoir also offers a haunting explanation for Hepburn’s legendary waifish figure. Starvation, rather than genetics, was responsible for the silhouette craved by so many “Breakfast at Tiffany” fans.
“Twenty two thousand people died from hunger in Holland during the final months of World War II, my mother escaping death by a hairbreadth,” Dotti writes in the book. “She was sixteen years old, stood almost five foot six and weighed eighty-eight pounds.”
In another passage, he describes that Hepburn “suffered from asthma, jaundice and other illnesses caused by malnutrition, including acute anemia and a serious form of edema which Mum explained like this: ‘It begins with your feet and when it reaches your heart, you die. With me, it was above the ankles when I was liberated.’ “
According to People, those wartime memories plagued the star for the rest of her life. “When I would go to the station, there were cattle cars packed with Jewish families, with old people and children,” Hepburn once said. “We did not yet know that they were traveling to their deaths. People said they were going to the ‘countryside.’ It was very difficult to understand, for I was a child. All the nightmares of my life are mixed in with those images.”
Born in Belgium to a British father and Dutch mother, Hepburn lived through the Nazi occupation of Holland, including the Dutch famine which killed 22,000 in 1944. At the end of the war, a soldier gave her 7 bars of chocolate, which she associated with joy and liberation for the rest of her life.
A cure for the mean reds, perhaps?
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
