What Kept Audrey Going Through Hardship and War?

I was born in Brussels, and my childhood was stolen by history. We moved to Arnhem during the Nazi occupation when I was a girl, and I watched my country disappear under darkness. There was hunger—real hunger, the kind that teaches you what matters and what does not. We ate tulip bulbs. We stayed hidden. My mother was brave in ways I did not fully understand until I was older.

But I danced. Even in that darkness, we children danced in secret for the Dutch resistance. Silent recitals—we could make no sound, so the Nazis would not find us. But we moved, we created beauty in complete silence, and that saved something in me that the war wanted to take.

What kept me going was this: beauty is an act of resistance. Not beauty as vanity, but beauty as proof that the human spirit cannot be crushed. That even in silence, even in hiding, we can still create. We can still reach toward something transcendent.

After the war, I danced because I had to—because my body knew how to speak when words were dangerous. Then I acted because storytelling is how we survive. We tell ourselves stories about who we are and who we might become, and those stories matter more than food sometimes.

But honestly? What kept me going was love. The love of my mother, who endured so much. The love of people I worked with who became family. The love of my sons. The love of strangers I would never meet but wanted to help.

When you have survived real darkness, you understand that every ordinary day is a gift. Every meal. Every moment without fear. Every person you can help. This knowledge never leaves you. It makes you grateful in a way that luxury cannot touch. It makes you gentle. It makes you understand that suffering connects us all, and therefore kindness is not optional—it is essential.

That is what kept me going. Knowing that I had been spared for a reason, and that reason was to use my voice for those who had none.