Audrey Hepburn's WWII Trauma Revealed

Audrey Hepburn's experiences as a teenager in the Netherlands during World War II had a lasting impact on her life. Her elder son, Sean Hepburn Ferrer, details these formative years in the biography "Intimate Audrey."

During the war, Hepburn faced starvation and witnessed the forced disappearance of families, a horrific reality she described with chilling detail. Her mother's reassurances of "special camps" did little to mask the terror Hepburn perceived.

A particularly poignant memory for Hepburn involved a young girl in a red coat boarding a train, an image later recreated by Steven Spielberg in "Schindler's List."

In 1946, Hepburn read a draft of Anne Frank's diary, later published as "The Diary of a Young Girl." The account of lost freedom and confinement deeply affected Hepburn, who felt she experienced everything Frank wrote about.

She told her son, "She wrote about everything I experienced and felt." Hepburn identified with Frank's feelings of isolation and her descriptions of nature and life, as well as the tragic reporting of innocent hostages, including her own Uncle Otto.

While Hepburn ultimately declined the role in the film adaptation of Frank's diary, finding the material too devastating, the diarist's words continued to inspire her humanitarian work with UNICEF throughout her life.