How Audrey Hepburn Fought the Nazis During WWII

Audrey Hepburn worked for Resistance leaders during World War II after the Nazis killed her beloved uncle, a new book about her life reveals.

Author Robert Matzen presents proof, according to the New York Post, in his upcoming work entitled Dutch Girl: Audrey Hepburn and World War II, that the former ballerina did more than her part to resist the Nazis. Her passion to join the effort was apparently sparked by the death of her uncle, Count Otto van Limburg Stirum, at the hands of Adolf Hitler’s soldiers.

The details of her time in the the Dutch Resistance, Matzen reveals, come out of Otto’s 188-page diary.

“When my mother talked about herself and what life taught her, Hollywood was the missing guest,” Hepburn’s son, Luca Dotti, wrote for the book’s forward. “Instead of naming famed Beverly Hills locations, she gave us obscure and sometimes unpronounceable Dutch ones. Red-carpet recollections were replaced by Second World War episodes that she was able to transform into children’s tales.

“I now understand why the words Good and Evil, and Love and Mercy were so fundamental in her own narrative,” he continued, “Why she was open about certain facts and why she kept so many others in a secluded area of her being.”