My Name Is Selma: The remarkable memoir of a Jewish Resistance fighter and Ravensbrück survivor

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What a talent, what a career, what a life, and what a treat to relive it all with this most down-to-earth of demigods. In reality, countless Jews worked with non-Jews together in the resistance – much more than we knew during the war,” van de Perre writes in the book. “Often, it was assumed that Jews who escaped deportation immediately went into hiding but that wasn’t always the case. It wasn’t in the interest of Jews to be identified as such. This explains to a large degree why so few Jews had been recognized for their actions.” Early in her double life, she was stopped by German officers while holding a ‘huge suitcase’ full of boxes of illegal documents, en route to Poland.

We were liberated on April 23, 1945, by the Swedish Red Cross. We were weak, and so scared when we were taken out of the main camp and left standing outside the gates. We thought we were going to be killed, too, and it was a terrible feeling after all we’d experienced and survived. She repeatedly relied on her instincts to skirt disaster. “I didn’t allow the fear to overwhelm me – the desire to thwart the Nazis and help people in danger was stronger,” she writes. The costs included stomach aches and a traumatizing state of constant vigilance. The title of the book is pivotal and when 'my name is Selma' comes up in the narrative, it was so poignant that I cried as I read the words. Selma van de Perre is interviewed about her book at the National Holocaust Museum, Jan. 9, 2020. (Cnaan Liphshiz)It was a job,” Selma recalls, simply. But the stakes were terrifyingly high and near-misses frequent. On one occasion, van de Perre had to infiltrate the German headquarters in Paris to deliver an envelope to a resistance spy and return some correspondence he would give her. She was told it was vital to the rescue of captured fighters being held in France. I find it astonishing myself,” she admits. “But it was easy. I was incredibly scared going into that office, walking past the flags and uniforms, but I smiled as if there was nothing the matter, asked for the person and he came down straight away. De Perre and her family were of Jewish descent, meaning they too were a target in 1940s Europe. As persecution against the Jews increased, De Perre knew it was no longer safe for them to stay where they were. After her father left, Selma’s mother and sister left Amsterdam and went into hiding. As there wasn’t room for her, Selma, now twenty years of age, stayed in Amsterdam, working various jobs, and staying with extended family. Eventually, she moved on and began living under a false, non-Jewish identity.

They were very clever, the Germans. They didn’t want the Dutch people to be upset and fight against them, so they were careful to introduce measures very slowly. But then, of course, the rules came in that non-Jews were not to visit Jewish people, and Jewish people were not allowed to visit them; Jews were not to have things or be allowed lots of things. Life began getting very difficult. Every day is a danger. Every job is a danger, but you have to do it. You took it on to do, and it becomes almost a daily job, like going to the office except it’s more dangerous.” The Madurodam is a miniature park and tourist attraction in the Hague built by the parents of George Maduro, a Jewish war hero in the Netherlands who was killed in the Dachau concentration camp. (Paulo Amorim/VW Pics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images) Mathijs Deen, Het Spoor Terug, Mijn naam is Selma deel 1. VPRO( 5 januari 2020).Geraadpleegd op 13 januari 2020. Mrs van de Perre chronicled her remarkable stint in the resistance in her 2020 memoir My Name is Selma. She wrote the book in part, she said, to “pay tribute” to all the Jewish-Dutch resistance fighters who did not make it out of the war alive, and felt it was her “duty” to raise awareness after finding Britons were largely unaware of their efforts.

Prior to her arrest, van de Perre aided the Nazi fighters by traveling across the Netherlands to distribute resistance newspapers.

Selma van de Perre-Velleman (born 7 June 1922) is a Dutch–British resistance fighter. [2] During the Second World War, she worked as a courier, a term that at the time acquired a specific connotation as "messenger of the resistance". As today’s event comes to a close, we’d like to thank Ms. Van De Perre again for joining us. It’s been a pleasure ma’am,” Hileman said. “May each of us remember the powerful story we heard here today and use the knowledge to fight the evil that exists in our society, to stand up for freedom, equality, justice and peace and to better ourselves and the world around us.” It comes as a relief to learn that, in the immediate aftermath of war, Selma was able to reclaim some of her stolen youth, indulging in light-hearted fun with friends and boyfriends. In London, she eventually got an office job for the Dutch section of the BBC, where she met Hugo van de Perre, a Belgian journalist. They were married, happily and had a son. After her husband’s 1979 death, she, too, worked as a journalist for Dutch and Belgian television and newspapers.Spears’ vulnerability shines through as she describes her painful journey from vulnerable girl to empowered woman. Selma describes her postwar life—she’s still alive today! After the war, she learned that her parents and younger sister had been murdered, and that her two older brothers had survived. She moved to England, where she met her husband, with whom she had a son. In the final chapter, she discusses meeting fellow resistance members and prisoners in the decades that followed the war.