These World War II Heroines Should be Household Names

1. Fighting the Fascists Through Dance

Audrey Hepburn danced and performed in illegal underground recitals known as zwarte avonden (“black evenings”), and donated her earnings to the resistance. This despite her enfeebled physical condition, after the Nazis squeezed the Netherlands hard for resources to fuel their war effort. Within a few years, Audrey, like many other Dutch, began to suffer from malnutrition. She still danced, however. As she put it: “it was some way in which I could make some kind of contribution“. The resistance also put her to work as a child courier, because her youth made her less suspicious in the eyes of German occupiers. She carried documents, coded messages, and other items between various resistance groups. On one occasion, she recalled: “I had to step in and deliver our tiny underground newspaper, I stuffed them in my woollen socks and my wooden shoes, I got on my bike, and delivered them“.

Towards the end of WWII in Europe, a German blockade of food to the Netherlands led to a famine known as the Hunger Winter. Audrey and her family subsisted on miniscule food amounts, including tulip bulbs. By the time the Netherlands were liberated at war’s end, she and her family were close to starvation. As she put it: “We lost everything, of course… but we didn’t give a hoot. We got through with our lives, which was all that mattered“. Soon after the war, she moved to Britain, got her first film role in 1948, and went on to star in dozens more movies. She never forgot her childhood experience in wartime. Audrey Hepburn eventually became a special ambassador for United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), an organization dedicated to the provision of humanitarian aid to children worldwide.

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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading

Accidental Talmudist – Girl With a Gun: Simone Segouin

All That is Interesting – Zinaida Portnova: The Teenage Partisan Who Became a Soviet Hero During World War II

Cracked – ‘The Limping Lady’ Was WWII’s Most Underrated Heroine

Daily Mail, August 29^th, 2015 – The Hotpants Hotshot: Formidable Derring-do of the Nazi Hunting, Gun Toting Pin Up Teen of the French Resistance

Encyclopedia Britannica – Josephine Baker

Forward – True History of an Unknown Hero of the French Jewish Resistance

Greif, Gideon – We Wept Without Tears: Testimonies of the Jewish Sonderkommando From Auschwitz (2005)

History – This Teenager Nazis With Her Sister During WWII

History Collection – Dangerous Women That the Law Couldn’t Contain

History Network – Josephine Baker’s Daring Double Life as a World War II Spy