The director of the film crew pointed to the baby and asked Audrey to feed it. She did not agree

Robert Matzen “Audrey Hupburn. The Warrior”, translated by Maria Gębicka-Frąc – excerpt:

Audrey got up on the morning of Tuesday, September 22, 1992, without realizing how that day would shorten her life line: she had only four months to go. To her horror, the stomach ache continued as she and Robbie flew in the helicopter to Baidoa, two hundred and seventy kilometers northwest. Until recently, the city had perhaps forty thousand inhabitants, now, with a quarter of a million refugees, has become the main scene of Somali tragedy. Ian MacLeod advised that it is better known lately as the “city of death”. He was there and saw this tragedy with his own eyes.

Phoebe Fraser of CARE Australia, daughter of former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, saw it too. She had been to Baidoa for the first time a month earlier. “As we drove into town, the car fell silent, and even the merry rooftop security guards fell silent in the face of this waking nightmare. Men, women, and children, all so weak that they could barely stand, wandered along the main road in search of food. Driving was dangerous because people who were near death react slowly and cannot hear or pay attention to the oncoming traffic. ” She suspected that these unfortunates would have welcomed a quick death under the wheels.

It’s time for Audrey and Robbie to initiate. On the plane, Mark Stirling reported that the weather had changed and it was raining – it had actually rained last night. Maybe rain is good for a country where water is scarce, but it also spreads germs, and germs mean certain death to people exhausted from hunger. The smallest and most vulnerable left the fastest. “The first sign that it was raining was the number of carcasses of children on the streets of Baidoa,” Stirling said of that week.

Ian MacLeod stated, “Baidoa was the epicenter of hunger. I anticipated them.” [Audrey i Robbiego]: “In Kismayo you saw a tragic situation, as in Mogadishu, but here it will be much worse.” “His words were a blow to both guests in this God-forsaken country and for the people of the people. They prepared for any prospect they could imagine. he couldn’t imagine what lay ahead.

(…)

As Audrey got out of the car, she remarked, “I was in the middle of a nightmare.” The sight was so terrifying that it could shorten her life: volunteers who came to Somalia to improve the situation were throwing canvas sacks on the truck. Audrey realized there was a corpse in the bags. It bothered her that they looked like shopping bags and that they were thrown around like that. “They collected over a hundred bodies this morning, most of them very small.”

Ian could see her hesitating to go on. After a while, she forced herself and walked away from the car, because that’s what she came here for: to see the worst. Ian realized, “It seemed like being able to see everything and tell the world later about it gave her strength.”

They entered the Concern building. A nurse named Margaret explained that they served fifteen thousand hot meals a day – unimixes and protein cakes. She mentioned a “treatment center” for the worst cases. Audrey and the others started in the direction indicated, across the small bridge. Audrey’s friend Anna Cataldi came the same way the other day as she was preparing material for her newspaper.

She wrote: “In order to reach the treatment center, we must break through a sea of ​​tormented people and naked ulcerated infants and rags lying on the ground that cover either sleeping people or a corpse – you never know.”

“It was …” Betty Press began and paused, overwhelmed by the memories. “I couldn’t believe it, these kids were so skinny. It’s really impossible to describe.”

There was a tree in the treatment center in the yard, and around it, as Audrey had described to the press, there were dozens of blankets with “skinny, terribly skinny children of all ages, small and a little bigger, who I thought were already gone. Their eyes looked like they were gone.” huge pools… ”She broke off, looking for a word“… questions. They look at you like… I don’t quite know how to say it… as if asking, “Why?” “.

The children “were more or less force fed” by Concern volunteers, she explained. They were carefully given “a spoonful of food every few minutes, because they cannot drink or eat themselves, or they don’t want to. I am amazed at the human immunity that they were still alive.”

She lowered her gaze to a battered boy, maybe fourteen, who was struggling to breathe. “I knew he was fighting for every breath … I had asthma all my childhood … and I was so anxious to help him breathe.” As she looked at him, “he just cringed and died.”

Everywhere she looked, the tragedy of tiny creatures unfolded everywhere. “There was a little girl, standing still, leaning against a wooden door. Someone wrapped a piece of white cloth around her. I couldn’t help it. I tried to get her to react. But she just stared blankly at nothingness.”

They were unfortunate creatures, starving, abandoned, orphaned. Tiny, some with their mothers, but most alone, with bloated bellies and a vast emptiness in their eyes. “A child who has been traumatized […] it had seen parents killed or tortured, or other atrocities […] can’t give his parents back, “said Audrey despairingly.

The silence was the worst. “They are silent. Silent children. This silence is something that is never forgotten.” And immediately she corrected herself, adding, “You can hear the cough sometimes. Lots of coughs because most of them have tuberculosis or diarrhea which kills them, or bronchitis that they can’t deal with.”

Ian MacLeod remembered “the deep shock and horror on Audrey’s face as she watched the pain of mothers who, also in pitiful condition, knew there was nothing they could do to save their children from dying.” Ten children died in the tragic hour they spent at the Concern feeding facility.

One of the young Irish nurses walked over to Audrey and touched her shoulder. She whispered that maybe she should go to the staff quarters to get away from this nightmare for a while. “Here it is much worse to watch than to work,” she added. Audrey forced a smile and replied that this was what she was here for: seeing the worst and then telling the press about it.

“The workers there ran the camp as best they could,” Betty said. “I’m sure they saved many lives.”

The director of the film crew pointed to the baby and asked Audrey to try to feed it. Audrey knew right away that the baby would not survive. She did not agree. She didn’t want to be recorded at certain important moments. She had always felt that “filming of evil was necessary” to publicize a desperate situation, but in this case she refused. These people deserved privacy, “human dignity,” as she put it, even now. Especially now.

“After entering such a feeding center,” she said, “you are overcome with curiosity, I can call it that, as well as embarrassment and shyness. I feel like I shouldn’t be there. I feel like I should go out. It’s like walking into a room where someone dies. : there should only be family and nurses there, you know what I mean … you are kind of an intruder. “

Robbie described his companion: “Full of love for people beyond compassion. Perhaps it is more than empathy. The ability to design her imagination so that she can really feel what others feel.” For an empathetic person, such a burden was simply too great.

So many here died in ways she knew all too well from the hungry winter. “I wonder if people think about the pain of dying of hunger, about what happens to the body. The process is very slow. It’s not something that you just sneak past and then die through.”

Her brain turned on the autopilot. She clung to the children who started to bounce back from the food that brought them back to life – she sat with them and spoke words they did not understand, but her smile made smiles appear on their faces as well. This was how she had dealt with children since Ethiopia. The actress could do it. The woman inside was screaming.

“I was in Hell,” she later confessed to her sons. Baidoa was hell – and it became the end of everything.

“UNICEF killed Audrey,” said one of her friends in a voice choked with emotion after twenty years. He meant Baidoa had killed her.

Luca believed that from Liberation Day in 1945, the war had been relentlessly pursuing his mother, that she was being tracked by a bullet, signed Audrey Hepburn. “From a certain moment, she knew that life was an equation and that she had to make sense of it,” he recalled. – “This is the most beautiful thing about my mother; something that I miss and that people close to her long for. She knew that she could close the circle. She can go out and meet this war ball.” For him, the closing of the circle was a trip to Somalia. She knew it would kill her. And it killed. She donated the last drops of her life force to the unfortunates in Baidoa, and she did not keep a dime for herself.

(…)

Those who were with her in Somalia saw signs of her physical deterioration – as when Betty noticed how difficult it was for her to crouch in front of her baby and then straighten up. Press also noted her intense focus. “She wanted to make this trip. At all costs.”

“In the last days of her stay in Somalia and later in Kenya, where we had a press conference, Audrey complained of an irritating stomach ache,” recalled MacLeod, “but she and Robert were sure it was just mild food or water poisoning. symptoms that we all felt on a fairly regular basis in Somalia. “

Later, Robbie said, “Of all our journeys [dla UNICEFu] this was the one Audrey cared about the most, and she pursued it with the utmost determination. The journey was exhausting her emotionally and physically, but she was tough like on other expeditions – she had tremendous energy and courage. “Yes, she had stomach aches, and yes, it was put down to” amoebiasis. “

Robbie knew her psyche had been ruined by the journey she wanted to make “at any cost”. After returning from Somalia, this most enduring woman he had ever met announced to the world that she would never rise again. Has she proved to be determined and brave to the point of exaggeration? Did she achieve a Pyrrhic victory by overcoming all obstacles and experiencing the worst in Somalia?

The journalist covering the London press conference understood the risks she was putting herself to. “It’s not recognized in many Third World countries, so it can get into unstable areas where officials are not allowed. She admits feeling nervous,” though not enough to stop me from leaving. “

MacLeod had known her courage two years earlier during their trip to Canberra, but after Somalia he saw the full picture.

“She was doing something she didn’t have to do,” he said when asked about the warrior Audrey. “She just wanted it. I tried to understand why. She went where other goodwill ambassadors had not been. They were giving a concert or attending a gala. No one else went to Somalia. She wanted to change the fate of the world’s most disadvantaged people. , she was a fighter. “

The book was published in Poland on March 9, 2022 by Albatros Publishing House.

Audrey Hepburn. Wojowniczka – cover Albatross

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