Arnhem, Netherlands – January 1945
The snow had turned from white to ash weeks ago—clumped with soot from chimneys and boots, black from the bicycle tires of German officers, stained in places from things most suspected but never said aloud, lest even the speaking of it make it true. Audrey stepped around a half-frozen patch that looked too dark to be mud and kept walking. Her shoes were thin, soaked through. The left one hurt with every step.
The message—like all the ones before it—was pressed under the insole, folded three times, sealed with wax, wrapped in linen. She hadn’t read it. She never did. She knew only what she was told: an address and a time. Someone—probably more than one—was being moved. If she were caught—if the message were intercepted—it wouldn’t just be her neck on the line. It would be theirs. All of theirs.
She moved without hurry, without pause. That was the trick—to look like nothing mattered. But not to overdo it. A delicate balance.
Two blocks down, the street narrowed into an alley she knew well. She glanced over her shoulder once, saw no one, and turned into it.
That was when the soldier stepped out of the doorway.
He was the same guard who had stopped her the last time she went to the market for her mother. But something was different this time. The blonde-haired soldier with the square jaw and pale eyes wasn’t interested in her smile today. He was looking for something.
“Laat me je schoenen zien.”
Let me see your shoes.
He wasn’t shouting. That was the worst part. The quiet ones were always more dangerous.
Audrey did her best not to freeze. She tilted her head, trying to play the fool. “My shoes?” she said, as if puzzled. Then pointed at his boots. “I’m afraid they won’t fit you.”
He didn’t smile.
“Do not make me hurt you,” he said. “I demand to see your shoes.”
She swallowed the lump rising in her throat and focused on her breath. Slow. Steady. Nothing to hide. She could cry or vomit later. Right now, she needed to stay whole.
She studied him for weakness—any hint of mercy. Nothing. He stood tense, rifle across his chest, cigarette at the corner of his mouth. His eyes were hard and flat.
“Your shoes,” he repeated. “Both of them.”
She blinked once, then bent down and untied her right shoe—the empty one. She handed it over calmly.
He took it, turned it over, knocked it against the wall. Glanced inside.
Then looked down at her other foot.
The left one.
The one with the message.
His gaze shifted upward and landed on her face.
And in that split second, time slowed.
She had not always lived in this place.
She had not always been starving.
She had not always lied to soldiers and bled through her socks.
Before the war—before the broken windows and the hanged boy outside the school, before the men in long coats and the silences that replaced conversations—Audrey had lived in Ixelles, a neighborhood in Brussels. Her father was English. Her mother, Dutch nobility. They had a big house. Proper meals. A nanny who insisted on posture.
She remembered the blue tiles in the upstairs bathroom. How cold they were on her toes in the morning.
She remembered the smell of her father’s cherry tobacco. How it clung to his overcoat even after he was gone.
He left in 1935. Walked out one morning and never came back. No note. No goodbye. Audrey was six.
They moved after that—first to England, briefly. Then to the Netherlands. Her mother said it would be safer there. “The Netherlands stayed neutral during the last war,” she’d said, with the certainty of someone who still believed history repeated itself politely.
They arrived in Arnhem in 1939. Audrey was ten. She wore a green dress and carried three books in a suitcase too heavy for her to hold without switching arms.
The first time she saw the ballet studio on Weverstraat, she cried. Not because it was beautiful—though it was—but because the sight of a barre and a floor-length mirror made her believe, just for a moment, that the world could still be kind.
She began taking lessons three times a week. Madame Fleury told her she had lines like ribbon and hands like language.
“If you work, you will dance in Paris,” the woman said.
Audrey believed her.
She danced until the Germans invaded.
She danced until the studio was seized.
She danced until the ration cards meant she no longer had the strength to lift herself en pointe.
Now she danced only in secret—and only to earn bread.
The soldier was still looking at her left foot.
Audrey felt blood seeping into the heel again, warm against the leather. She’d reopened the blister two streets back.
He pointed at the shoe.
She bent, slowly, letting her skirt lift just enough to distract, to annoy. Maybe it would work. Maybe if she irritated him, he’d forget why he stopped her.
Inside, her heartbeat thundered in her ears.
She pulled one loop. Then another.
And then—she paused.
She remembered the day they took her uncle.
He had spoken out once. Just once. At a town meeting.
The wrong man overheard.
Two nights later, they came. No trial. No farewell.
The next morning, his body was in the street with four others.
They left him there for three days.
It snowed the second.
She remembered the way his mouth had frozen slightly open.
After that, her mother stopped going to church. Audrey stopped asking questions.
She coughed—sharp, loud, real.
The cold made it easy.
She bent farther, muttered, “Blister,” as she reached for her ankle.
The soldier squinted.
His fingers hovered over the strap of his rifle.
She felt her hands trembling. She forced them still.
She thought of the music room in Brussels. The way the piano keys felt under her fingers. The dress her mother once wore to a party, all silver thread and velvet. The first time someone told her she looked like a dancer. The first time she believed it.
Not here.
Not now.
She gripped the heel.
And then—
He waved her off.
Just like that.
Was it a test?
She didn’t know.
But she couldn’t leave it hanging. “But sir,” she said, eyes wide with mock concern. “It will only take a minute. I only slowed because of my blister. Surely you understand. Let me show you, please.”
He flushed—deep, sudden red.
“Go!” he shouted. “I do not have time for silly girls and silly games!”
She stood slowly, nodded.
The ruse had worked. By pretending eagerness to comply, she had erased any doubt. She put the right shoe back on, turned, and walked as if she had nothing to hide.
Her dance teacher’s voice floated back to her.
“You may become too tall to dance someday. But if that happens, consider acting. It’s a more vulgar act than dancing, to be sure, but I can tell—you were born for an audience.”
She walked away without breaking stride.
The mission must go on.
She didn’t cry. Didn’t breathe. Didn’t look back.
She turned three corners and ducked into the alley behind the bakery. Her hands were numb. Her foot screamed.
She knocked—twice, then once, then twice. The door cracked. A boy—twelve, maybe—opened it. No words passed. Just the sack exchanged.
Inside: the note.
A name.
An address.
A time.
Someone would be moved tonight.
Someone would live.
Because she had not failed.
At home, her mother didn’t ask where she’d been. She never did anymore.
Audrey peeled off her socks and soaked her foot in a pot of boiled water gone cold. The skin was torn open. The insole ruined.
“You haven’t danced in a while,” her mother said.
“I don’t want to,” Audrey replied.
Another lie.
“I’ll dance when the war is over.”
But the studio was shuttered. The mirrors gone. The music stopped.
Only messages now.
Only bleeding feet.
That night, under two thin blankets that didn’t reach her toes, Audrey lay awake listening to the wind.
She imagined the person she’d saved.
A man.
A woman and child.
Someone.
She imagined them running through snow.
She imagined a cracked door. Lights off. No one speaking. Just breath and trust and survival.
She imagined herself dancing again.
Maybe not in Paris.
Maybe not ever.
But maybe.
If she lived.
If the war ended.
If no one asked for her shoes tomorrow.
She closed her eyes.
And whispered into the dark:
“I want to be more than this. I want to dance. I want to act. I want my life back.”
Then Audrey Kathleen Ruston pulled the blanket over her face and waited for morning, unaware the war would end within months. That she would dance again. That, as her dance instructor once predicted, she would soon begin to act.
She had no way of knowing that the same instincts she used to fool a soldier and complete her mission would one day become the very qualities the world would adore.
That she would take on a new name: Hepburn.
Author’s Note:
This story is based on true events from the early life of Audrey Hepburn, who served as a teenage courier for the Dutch resistance during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Living in Arnhem during the final years of World War II, she carried secret messages hidden in her shoes—fully aware that discovery could mean execution. Though the world would come to know her for her grace and beauty on screen, few realize the quiet, life-risking bravery she embodied long before the fame.
While there is no record of such a direct confrontation, every moment in this story is drawn from the reality of that time—the risks she took, her hunger, her fear, her loss, and her determination. Audrey never saw herself as a hero. But for those who lived because she delivered what others could not, she was exactly that.