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Selma van de Perre was seventeen when World War II began. Until then, being Jewish in the Netherlands had not been an issue. But by 1941 it had become a matter of life or death. On several occasions, Selma barely avoided being rounded up by the Nazis. While her father was summoned to a work camp and eventually hospitalized in a Dutch transition camp, her mother and sister went into hiding—until they were betrayed in June 1943 and sent to Auschwitz. In an act of defiance and with nowhere else to turn, Selma took on an assumed identity, dyed her hair blond, and joined the Resistance movement, using the pseudonym Margareta van der Kuit. For two years “Marga” risked it all. Using a fake ID, and passing as Aryan, she traveled around the country and even to Nazi headquarters in Paris, sharing information and delivering papers—doing, as she later explained, what “had to be done.” Selma was just 17 and living in Amsterdam when World War II began. Her Jewishness had not mattered much before then; her family was not particularly religious, and, like other Dutch Jews, they were integrated into the fabric of Dutch society. Apart from being beaten and tortured, De Perre and her fellow prisoners were also subject to starvation. De Perre said they were not given lunch despite working for so many hours and not being paid. After a long day of work the prisoners would be given a slice of bread and so-called coffee. Van de Perre’s two older brothers survived the war in the United Kingdom, where she moved, too, starting a family and working as a journalist.
I really liked that Selma also put an emphasis on how hard it was to keep going after the war and the depression she struggled with and that she knew other people struggled with as well. And the fact that many survivors were told to just 'keep living' and not to think about the atrocity that had happened to them and their families. As well, Semla briefly described the trauma young Jewish children experienced both living during the war as well as from being separated from parents at a young age, loving their foster parents and then bein returned to parents who were, tragically, all but strangers to them. And that many children never really got over this.
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But the war years kept encroaching. She stayed in touch with resistance friends and testified for the colleague who had saved her at the cost of betraying others. In 1983, she received the Dutch Resistance Commemorative Cross. She never forgot her mother, father and sister – all, it turns out, murdered by the Nazis. The loss is “a devastating hole inside me that will never heal,” she writes, and this late-life memoir is dedicated to them. Though there are no concrete numbers about the participation of Jews in organized resistance activities, “the actual number is higher than what was believed for decades after World War II,” Barnouw told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Es ist nun schon eine Weile her, dass ich dieses Buch beendet habe. Und es fällt mir auch mit etwas Abstand immer noch schwer, darüber zu schreiben. Kurz: Es ist wirklich sehr sehr lesenswert. Und es bewegt. Sehr sogar. Nach all den Jahren im Studium mit dem Schwerpunkt "Jugendwiderstand im Dritten Reich" und nach all den Büchern, die ich schon zu diesem Thema gelesen habe, berühren mich solche Geschichten, solche Lebensläufe immer noch zutiefst. Und ich bin froh und erleichtert, dass es so ist, dass man da offenbar nicht abstumpfen kann.
She declined and, spooked, told her boss. But he convinced her to meet with her admirer and steal his identity papers. Selma managed it, unscathed. 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.” The story transitions to the Nazi occupation. Her brothers would soon leave the Netherlands—one as a merchant marine, and the other with his Dutch army unit that moved to England after the collapse of the Dutch government. Over time, the Van De Perre family began to realize that the occupation would be trouble for the Jewish community. Eventually, Selma’s father was summoned by the authorities and sent to a work camp in the Netherlands. While there, he was able to write letters to the family. However, he was soon sent to Auschwitz, where he was murdered. So I said, ‘can I help?’” she explained as she remembered how enthusiastic she was as a young girl. “They said, ’oh yes, are you sure?’ and I said yes.--so that’s how my career started.”After De Perre concluded her talk, Col. Brandon R. Hileman, 86th Airlift Wing vice commander, thanked her and presented her with a gift as a token of appreciation. For years, Selma van de Perre was “too busy living” to share her story with the world. She raised a son; taught schoolchildren in London; attended social functions with her husband, BBC correspondent Hugo van de Perre; and later worked as a journalist herself. But thanks in part to her remarkable memory, the former Dutch resistance worker and concentration camp prisoner—who turned 99 in June 2021—was at last able to write her memoirs. The result, My Name is Selma, was published in May. The resistance organized a room for her in Utrecht in 1944. This town is located at the center of Holland, and all Dutch trains passed through it – a perfect starting location for courier work. Here she was eventually arrested at a visit to comrades. She was taken to the prison in Amsterdam, where she was interrogated. Her true identity had not yet been discovered.
The woman was screaming, ‘no, no, no, please, no, no, no!’” De Perre recounted. “We never saw her again.”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.