Dutch Girl

Audrey Hepburn has always been an actress I've admired for her poise and beauty .I didn't know a great deal about her and so this book was vastly interesting.
It was well researched, with excerpts from interviews Hepburn gave and quotes from the survivors of Dutch wartime occupation .
It's very harrowing reading at times, you feel for the young Audrey ( as she would become) and see how the depravations of those years affected her adult life . I admire her more , if anything , after reading this book . What a remarkable woman .
With Dutch heritage on her mother's side and British on her father's, she claimed ancestry to both the Dutch nobility and the Hepburn family , Mary Queen of Scots 3rd husband was an ancestor of her Father's.
It was really informative and poignant at times . The death of her uncle at the hands of the Nazis would haunt her ,as would the abandonment of her father at aged 6. She had such a sad early life , it would be really hard not to empathise with the situations that she found herself in.
I really enjoyed this book, I learnt so much about life under Nazi occupation in the Netherlands . It's thought provoking and inspirational at the same time. I thoroughly recommend it.

Dutch Girl ,by Robert Matzen,is the story of movie star Audrey Hepburn, and more particularly her life as a young girl and in her early teenage years in Holland during WW2. I must admit I didn't know much about Ms Hepburn before reading this book, apart from her fame as an actress, and I was pleasantly surprised to learn how interesting her life and background were as well as reading an eye-opening and hard-hitting account of life in an occupied war-zone.
Hepburn was born into what was left of the Dutch nobility on her mother's side and with one of Mary Queen of Scots husbands on her father's side, so quite a pedigree.. Something that makes the book even more poignant is that she was only 6 weeks older than Ann Frank and lived a touch over 100 kms from where Ann and her family were experiencing a very different war. Coincidentally Audrey and her Mother later moved to Amsterdam with an employee of the publishers of Ann Frank's diary living in the apartment above who let Audrey read the manuscript. This had a very strong effect on her and she felt a very real connection to the unfortunate Ann and was even asked to play her in a movie a few years later...she declined.
Most of the book tells of Audrey growing up under German occupation then a battle zone as the Allies tried to oust the Nazis. Death is an everyday event and she sees things no-one,let alone a young girl,should have to see and experience as Robert Metzen tells the reality of life for for the civilians of occupied Holland. Hepburn's war affected her for the rest of her life and she went on to do great things for the victims of war in her many charitable acts.
This is a great read, not least for those who have read The Diary Of Ann Frank , Audrey was virtually the same age but her life and war experiences were totally different and her reaction to reading the diary says a lot.

This is a great read,even if Audrey Hepburn is only an obscure actress from the old days to you her story is a fascinating and moving one.