Audrey Hepburn was a British actress and humanitarian. Her first field mission for UNICEF was to Ethiopia in 1988.

She visited an orphanage in Mek’ele that housed 500 starving children and had UNICEF send food.

In August 1988, Hepburn went to Turkey on an immunisation campaign and toured Central America in February 1989, and met with leaders in Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala.

In April, she visited Sudan as part of a mission called ‘Operation Lifeline’.

In October 1989, she went to Bangladesh and in October 1990 to Vietnam, in an effort to collaborate with the government for national UNICEF-supported immunisation and clean water programmes.

In September 1992, four months before she died, Hepburn went to Somalia calling it apocalyptic. ‘I walked into a nightmare.

I have seen nothing like this – so much worse than I could possibly have imagined. I wasn’t prepared for this’.

Audrey Hepburn was born on 4 May 1929. Her childhood was sheltered and privileged.

As a result of her multinational background and travelling with her family due to her father’s job, she learned five languages: Dutch and English from her parents, and later French, Spanish, and Italian.

After Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939, Hepburn‘s mother moved to Arnhem in the hope that the Netherlands would remain neutral and be spared a German attack.

But after the Germans invaded the Netherlands in 1940, Hepburn used the name Edda van Heemstra, because an english-sounding name was considered dangerous during the German occupation.

Her family was profoundly affected by the occupation, with Hepburn later stating that ‘had we known that we were going to be occupied for five years, we might have all shot ourselves.

We thought it might be over next week … six months … next year … that’s how we got through’.

We saw young men put against the wall and shot, and they’d close the street and then open it, and you could pass by again … Don’t discount anything awful you hear or read about the Nazis. It’s worse than you could ever imagine. – Audrey Hepburn

Hepburn performed silent dance performances in order to raise money for the Dutch resistance effort. It was long believed that she participated in the Dutch resistance itself.

She had supported the resistance by giving ‘underground concerts’ to raise money, delivering the underground newspaper, and taking messages and food to downed Allied flyers hiding.

In addition to other traumatic events, she witnessed the transportation of Dutch Jews to concentration camps.

Later she stated that more than once she was at the station seeing trainloads of Jews being transported, seeing all these faces over the top of the wagon.

I remember, very sharply, one little boy standing with his parents on the platform, very pale, very blond, wearing a coat that was much too big for him, and he stepped on the train. I was a child observing a child.

In the 1950’s, Hepburn narrated two radio programmes for UNICEF, re-telling children’s stories of war. In 1989, Hepburn was appointed a Goodwill Ambassador of UNICEF.

On her appointment, she stated that she was grateful for receiving international aid after enduring the German occupation as a child, and wanted to show her gratitude to the organisation.

She worked in some of the poorest communities of Africa, South America, and Asia between 1988 and 1992. In 1992, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in recognition of her work as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador.

A month later, on the evening of 20th January 1993, she died of appendiceal cancer in her sleep at her home in Switzerland at the age of 63.

After her death, Gregory Peck went on camera and tearfully recited her favourite poem, ‘Unending Love’ by Rabindranath Tagore.

I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times …
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs,
That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms,
In life after life, in age after age, forever.

Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, its age-old pain,
Its ancient tale of being apart or together.
As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge,
Clad in the light of a pole-star piercing the darkness of time:
You become an image of what is remembered forever.

You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount.
At the heart of time, love of one for another.
We have played along side millions of lovers, shared in the same
Shy sweetness of meeting, the same distressful tears of farewell-
Old love but in shapes that renew and renew forever.

Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you
The love of all man’s days both past and forever:
Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life.
The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours –
And the songs of every poet past and forever.