Audrey Hepburn’s son, Sean Hepburn Ferrer, revealed how his mother’s upbringing in Nazi occupied Europe shaped her view of the world in his new uInterview.

“She was born in Brussels, her parents were living there, then her father left, and she went for 18 months to England to boarding school to perfect her English, and during that time the war broke out and her mother relocated to Holland … a neutral country. So they thought safer to be there, thinking that Hitler would somehow respect all of that, which of course he didn’t. He marched in,” Hepburn Ferrer explained to uInterview Founder Erik Meers.

“I think the loss of her father, living in the longest-occupied country of the second world war with the famous Dutch winter hunger and all of those trimmings certainly planted some pretty powerful seeds for the work she did later on as a UNICEF ambassador during the last five years of her life, which she referred to as her second and most important career,” he said. “So I think there she experienced the loss of everything you and I take for granted, you know, alongside with something that she talked a lot about, wasn’t just the hunger of the body, malnutritional, but the hunger of the soul.”

“She was not depressed, she was a joyful person, but it’s true she felt a sadness at times,” he said, “she felt sadness when her father left, she felt the sadness because of the war. And ultimately she felt incredibly betrayed in the last five years of her life from the world and the U.N. after World War II, ‘this is never going to happen again,’ and here she is propelled 50 years later in a camp in Somalia we have the capacity to solve the situation, it’s not a lack of means, it’s a lack of will that has created these tragedies.”

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