The 90 Days Audrey Hepburn Ate Tulip Bulbs to Survive

The 90 Days Audrey Hepburn Ate Tulip Bulbs to Survive 

April 16th, 1945. Velp, Nazi occupied Netherlands. A 16-year-old girl climbs out of a cellar. She weighs 88 lb. Her feet are swollen with edema, fluid retention that starts at the feet, and when it reaches your heart, you die. With her, it had reached above the ankles. She has jaundice. Her skin is yellow. Her eyes are sunken.

 She hasn’t eaten in 3 days. For the past 6 months, she survived on tulip bulbs. The first thing she noticed was the smell. Cigarette smoke. Freedom. But to understand how Audrey Hepburn, the woman the world knew as elegance itself, ended up eating flowers to survive, we need to go back to September 17th, 1944. The day the Allies tried to liberate Holland and failed.

September 17th, 1944. Arnum, Netherlands. 15-year-old Audrey Hepburn woke to a sound she’d never heard before. Thunder. But it wasn’t rain. It was thousands of Allied aircraft filling the sky. Operation Market Garden. The plan that was supposed to end the war by Christmas. Paratroopers would capture key bridges across Holland, open a corridor into Germany, liberate millions. Simple.

Except the operation failed. The bridge at Arnham, a bridge too far, the British couldn’t hold it. Of the 10,600 British and Polish troops who fought north of the Rine, only 2,398 made it back. The rest were killed or captured. And Holland, still occupied, still under Nazi control. 10 days later on September 27th, Reich’s Commasar Arthur Seace Inquart made an announcement.

The Dutch railway workers had gone on strike to support the Allied invasion. Now the Germans would punish the entire nation. All food transport from the Eastern Netherlands to the Western Provinces was hereby prohibited. 4 and a half million people lived in those western provinces. Amsterdam, Rotterdam, the Hague, the most densely populated region in Europe.

And suddenly no food could come in. The embargo was supposed to be temporary. Lift the strike, get your food back. But the railway workers didn’t return. They stayed on strike until the end of the war. And the embargo, it stayed, too. Then in November 1944, winter arrived. The coldest winter in 50 years. The canals froze solid.

 Barges couldn’t move. Roads were impassible. And the food, the food ran out. They called it the hunger winter. The hunger winter. And for Audrey Heburn hiding in a modest villa in the village of Vvelp with her mother, her aunt, and her elderly grandfather, it would be hell. Before Market Garden failed, the Dutch ration was 1,600 calories per day.

 Not comfortable, but survivable. By mid November 1944, it had dropped to 1,000 calories. By December, 800. By January 1945, 580 calories per day. That’s less than two McDonald’s cheeseburgers per day for an entire population. At Villa Buenhoff in Velp, breakfast for the Van Heamstra family was the same every morning.

Hot water, one slice of bread made from crushed brown beans. That was it. Lunch was soup made from a single potato for the whole family. Some days there was no potato, just water flavored with hope, I guess. Audrey later recalled, “I went as long as 3 days without food. Most of the time we existed on starvation rations.

Breakfast was hot water and one slice of bread made from brown beans. The broth for lunch was made from one potato. There was no milk, sugar, or cereals of any kind. 3 days, no food, just water and the knowledge that if you died, your family would eat whatever you had hidden. There was no fuel either, no coal, no wood, no gas for heating.

Every tree in the cities cut down, burned for warmth. People ripped up railway sleepers, tram tracks, furniture. In Amsterdam, a house collapsed because residents had removed so much wood from the structure to burn. Two people died. By January 1945, people were dying. Not in the countryside.

 Farmers still had some food, but in the cities, in the towns, in Kruvike, one neighborhood in Rotterdam, 7,000 people starve to death. 7,000 in one neighborhood. The official death toll for the hunger winter is between 18,000 and 22,000 people. But those are just the ones they could count. The ones who died officially in hospitals, in their homes, not in basements, not in alleys, not frozen in the snow.

And Audrey, at 15 years old, watching people die in the streets. She was about to learn what hunger really meant when the food ran out completely. When there was nothing left in the house, nothing in the stores, nothing anywhere. The Dutch government published a guide, a recipe book for cooking tulip bulbs. The Office of Food Supply guide to preparing tulip bulbs.

 Remove the skin and the bitter yellow center where the toxins are concentrated. Grate the bulbs into flour and add salt. Mix with water to make small loaves of bread. They were teaching people how to eat flowers because that’s all that was left. A Dutch priest who survived the hunger winter as a child described the taste like sawdust.

But it had calories, minerals, starch. It kept you alive barely. Audrey’s family, like thousands of others, dug up their tulip bulbs. They also ate sugar beets, nettles, grass, though Audrey said she really couldn’t stand it. Potato peels, flowers swept from harvesting machines. Anything.

 By early 1945, Audrey was showing the classic signs of severe malnutrition, edema. That’s when your body starving for protein starts retaining fluid. It begins in your feet and ankles. They swell up like balloons. Then it moves up your legs, your stomach, your chest. When it reaches your heart, you die. Audrey later explained it 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. Above the ankles, she was weeks, maybe days from death. She also developed acute anemia. Not enough red blood cells, constant exhaustion, jaundice. Her liver was failing, skin turned yellow, asthma and respiratory infections. No immune system left.

Severe weight loss. At 5’6 in tall, Audrey weighed 88 lb when the Canadians liberated Vvelp. For context, a healthy weight for her height is 120 to 140 lb. She’d lost 40% of her body mass. Her body was eating itself to survive. Her son, Luca, later said by the end of the war, she was very close to death. She survived by eating nettles and tulip bulbs and drinking water to fill her stomach.

Water to fill her stomach to trick her body into thinking it had eaten. But the worst part, she was one of the lucky ones because at least she was still alive. In the cities, hundreds were dying every week. Old people first, their bodies had no reserves. Then children, too young, too weak.

 Then men, they needed more calories, burned through their fat faster. Women survived longest. Evolution had given them more body fat, more reserves. But eventually, everyone starved. Cause of death, starvation, pneumonia, tuberculosis, edema, heart failure. But really, they all died of hunger. The diseases just finished what the Nazis started.

 The soup kitchens, garukans, served whatever they could scrape together. Soup made from sugarbeat peels. Soup made from tulip bulbs. Soup made from nothing. Just hot water with salt. But people stood in line for hours in the freezing cold because it was warm and warmth felt like food. At VAenhof, Audrey and her mother and aunt made a pact.

 They would give most of their rations to Audrey’s grandfather, Baron Vanimstra. He was old, in his 70s. He wouldn’t survive without more food. So they starved themselves to keep him alive. Audrey stopped menrating. Her body shut down a reproduction. No energy for that. Her hair thinned, her teeth loosened. She would faint if she stood up too quickly.

 Sometimes she was too weak to get out of bed. Before the hunger winter, Audrey had been active in the Dutch resistance, dancing at illegal fundraisers, carrying messages, helping wounded resistance fighters. By January 1945, she couldn’t do any of it anymore. She didn’t have the strength to walk across the room, let alone carry messages through Nazi checkpoints.

In March 1945, 3 weeks before liberation, Audrey was rounded up on the street. The Germans needed workers for military kitchens. They were grabbing anyone they could find. Audrey was marched with several other girls toward a German facility. She knew what that meant. Forced labor, maybe worse. So, when the soldiers backs were turned, she ran.

 She hid for days, barely moving, barely breathing, because if they caught her running, they’d shoot her on sight. April 29th, 1945. By now, the war was ending. Everyone knew it. The Allies were closing in from all sides. Berlin was surrounded. Hitler would be dead in 2 days. But Holland, still occupied, still starving, and dying at a rate of hundreds per day.

Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt under pressure from Queen Wilhelmina and Prince Bernhard authorized something unprecedented. Operation Mana. British bombers would fly over German occupied territory and drop food, not bombs, food. Air Commodore Andrew Gettys negotiated with German officers.

 The deal was the Allies would fly designated corridors, drop food at specific locations, no troops, no weapons, and the Germans wouldn’t shoot them down. It was a gamble. The Germans could have used it as a trap, shot down hundreds of Allied aircraft. But on April 29th at 2:24 p.m., the first Lancaster took off from England.

And 90 minutes later, it dropped 50,000 kg of food over the Hague. For the next 10 days, British and American bombers flew mission after mission. Operation Mana, Operation Chow Hound, over 3,000 RAF sorties. Over 2,200 USA CF sorties. 11,000 tons of food dropped from the sky. bread, flour, canned meat, chocolate, cigarettes.

Some Germans, ignoring orders, shot at the planes with handguns. Some food parcels missed the drop zones and killed civilians on impact, falling from 500 ft. But it worked. It saved nearly a million lives. The Dutch went insane with joy. They spelled out, “Thank you,” with rocks and fields so the pilots could see it from the air.

 They waved American flags, British flags, Canadian flags. They cried because after 6 months of dying in the dark, someone remembered they existed. But in Velp, where Audrey was hiding, the food drops didn’t reach them. They were too close to the front lines, too dangerous. They would have to wait for ground forces.

 They would have to wait for liberation. And every day of waiting was another day closer to death. April 16th, 1945. 700 a.m. Velp, Netherlands. For 211 days since Operation Market Garden began in September, the village had been under siege. Artillery, gunfire, bombs. The Van Heamstra family lived in their cellar, bullets thutting into the walls above them, explosions shaking the ground.

But on the morning of April 16th, the noise stopped. At first, they didn’t believe it. Maybe it was a pause in the fighting. Maybe the Germans were repositioning. But then Audrey smelled something. Something she hadn’t smelled in 5 years. cigarette smoke. English cigarette smoke. Her mother opened the cellar door, climbed the stairs, and found five Canadian soldiers standing at their front door, guns raised, until Audrey spoke to them in perfect English.

One of the soldiers shouted, “Not only have we liberated a town, we’ve liberated an English girl.” Audrey burst into tears. She was 16 years old, 88 lb, yellow from jaundice, barely able to stand. But she was alive, and the war finally was over. The Canadians handed out cigarettes and chocolate bars. Audrey asked for a cigarette, her first one ever.

 It made her choke, made her cough and gag. But to her, for the rest of her life, the smell of tobacco was the smell of freedom. She would smoke three packs a day until the day she died because cigarettes meant she wasn’t in that cellar anymore. Then came the chocolate. A Dutch soldier gave her seven chocolate bars. She ate them all in one sitting with condensed milk from a UN relief package.

She got sick, threw up, and then ate more because her body starved for 6 months. Couldn’t process that much food at once. But she didn’t care. For the first time in 210 days, she was full. Over the next few weeks, the UN, what would become UN, NICF, delivered massive amounts of food and medical supplies to Holland, Swedish flour, American canned goods, British medicine.

The famine was over, but the damage that would last forever. If you want to discover the dark truth behind Hollywood’s golden age, the trauma they covered up, the starvation that shaped their biggest stars, subscribe to our channel because what the hunger winter did to Audrey Heppern over 210 days, the permanent physical damage, the psychological scars, the body that never recovered.

is one of the most disturbing stories in Hollywood history and we’re exposing every detail they tried to hide. After the war, Audrey moved to Amsterdam. She tried to return to ballet, her dream, her passion. She studied under Sonia Gascal, one of the greatest ballet teachers in Europe. But her body was broken.

The malnutrition had done permanent damage. Her bones hadn’t developed properly during adolescence, critical growth years. Her immune system was destroyed. She got sick constantly. Respiratory infections, pneumonia, bronchitis. The anemia never went away. She would be tired for the rest of her life. And her muscles too weak, too damaged, no stamina.

In 1948, she won a scholarship to ballet Ramire in London. Her last chance at becoming a prima ballerina. Marie Rambar herself told her the truth. Despite your talent, your height, and weak constitution, the after effect of wartime malnutrition will make the status of prima ballerina unattainable. Your body can’t do this anymore.

 The war took that from you. So Audrey gave up ballet and turned to acting. Not because she wanted to, but because she had to. By 1953, she was a movie star, Roman Holiday, an Oscar, international fame. And everyone marveled at how thin she was, how elegant, how effortlessly slim. Effortless, right? Audrey rarely talked about The Hunger Winter.

 When journalists asked, she would deflect, change the subject, smile, and say something charming. Because what could she say? Yes, I’m thin because I almost died of starvation as a teenager. I weighed 88 lb at 16, teen, and my body never fully recovered. Every time you compliment my figure, you’re complimenting the after effects of near fatal malnutrition.

That’s not a fun story for Vogue. But privately to her family, she spoke about it. Her son, Luca Di, revealed decades later. People think because she was skinny that she had an eating disorder. But it’s not true. She loved Italian food and pasta. She ate a lot of grains, not a lot of meat, and a little bit of everything.

She would come home from a trip and immediately have a huge plate of spaghetti al pomodoro. She would eat large portions, but no matter how much she ate, she never gained weight. Her body damaged in adolescence couldn’t store fat properly anymore. She also developed habits that never went away.

 She always kept bread crusts in her purse, always. Because once you never knew when you’d eat again. She would eat entire jars of jelly in one sitting. couldn’t stop herself because once there was no jelly, there was nothing. And she couldn’t shake the fear that someday it would happen again. In 1988, 43 years after liberation, Audrey became a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF.

She traveled to war zones, famine zones, places where children were starving, Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, Bangladesh. And when people asked why she was so passionate about hungry children, she would say, “I know what it’s like. I was one of them.” She recognized herself in them. The hollow eyes, the swollen bellies from malnutrition, the way they hoarded food.

She saw the girl she used to be. The girl who ate tulip bulbs to survive. Audrey Hepburn and Anne Frank were the same age. Born 3 weeks apart. And June 12th, 1929. Audrey May 4th, 1929. Both lived in Nazi occupied Holland. Both survived the war years in hiding. Both were 15 years old during the hunger winter.

But only one survived. Anne Frank died in Bergen Bellson concentration camp in February or March 1945. Typhus starvation. She was 15. One month before liberation, one month before the war ended. She almost made it. Audrey in later interviews would sometimes mention Anne. Her son Luca remembered she was the same age as Anne Frank and later said that was the girl who didn’t make it.

and I did. Her voice would crack and her eyes would fill with tears because Audrey knew. She knew it was luck. Pure random, meaningless luck. Anne was in a camp. Audrey was in a cellar. Anne’s family was Jewish. Audrey’s was aristocratic. Anne was deported. Audrey was not. Anne died. Audrey lived.

 And it could have so easily been the other way around. Audrey once visited the AnneFrank house in Amsterdam. She walked through the rooms where Anne and her family hid for 2 years. She saw the bookcase hiding the secret annex, the diary in its glass case. And when she left, she said almost nothing. Because what do you say? That could have been me. It almost was.

Both girls survived the Nazis. Both survived the hunger winter. But Anne died one month before freedom. And Audrey lived to become the most famous actress in the world. Not because she was stronger, not because she was luckier, just because she survived one more day and then another and then the Canadians arrived.

When Audrey Hepburn arrived in Hollywood in the early 1950s, the studios had a problem. This beautiful, thin, elegant woman had a past. A Nazi occupied past. A starvation past. A past that included eating tulip bulbs to survive. Working for the Dutch resistance at 15, watching people die in the streets, nearly dying herself from edema and malnutrition.

That’s not the story they wanted to sell. So they buried it. The official story became Audrey Hepburn. European aristocrat trained as a ballet dancer in London. Discovered by chance for Roman holiday. Clean, simple, elegant. No Nazis, no starvation, no trauma, just a beautiful woman who happened to be skinny. And Audrey went along with it, not because she was ashamed, but because talking about it, reliving it was unbearable.

She would deflect, smile, change the subject. Oh, the war. Yes, it was difficult. But let’s talk about the film because what else could she do? Stand in front of cameras and say, “I have PTSD from watching people starve to death. My body is permanently damaged. I smoke three packs a day because it reminds me of liberation.

I can’t gain weight because I was malnourished at 15. I hoard food. I have survivors guilt about Anne Frank. Hollywood doesn’t want that story. It wasn’t until the 1980s and 90s, near the end of her life, that Audrey started talking about the war a little in bits and pieces, mostly to explain her UNICEF work. I know what hunger looks like.

 I know what it does to children. I’ve seen it. I’ve lived it. But even then, she minimized it. Yes, it was hard, but so many had it worse. I was lucky. lucky. She weighed 88 pounds and was dying of edema. But she called it lucky because at least she survived. In 1992, one year before her death, Audrey made her last major public appearance, a UNICEF mission to Somalia.

Children were starving, tens of thousands dead from famine. And Audrey, frail and exhausted, she was already sick with cancer. Walked among the dying children, held them, and later told reporters, “I recognize them. I see myself in them. I know what they’re going through.” 6 months later, she was dead.

 Colon cancer. January 20th, 1993. 63 years old. And the world mourned the loss of Audrey Hepburn, the elegant movie star. But they didn’t mourn Audrey Rustin, the 15-year-old who ate tulip bulbs. The girl who survived, the girl who remembered. In the decades after World War II, medical researchers studied the survivors of the hunger winter.

 This is Audrey Hepburn. The hidden truth. From wartime horrors to Hollywood secrets, we uncover what they’ve been hiding for decades.