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

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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. My Name is Selma” is a cousin to Judy Batalion’s recent “The Light of Days,” which focused on the Polish Jewish women in the anti-Nazi resistance. Like many of Batalion’s subjects, Selma Velleman did not look stereotypically Jewish. With her hair dyed blonde, she was able to assume a non-Jewish identity and work as a courier for the resistance. She passed as Margareta van der Kuit, or Marga, and that persona almost certainly saved her life.

In 1947, Van de Perre secured a job at the Dutch embassy in London with the assistance of her brother David. [3] Van de Perre went on to study anthropology and sociology. After graduating, Van de Perre became a teacher of sociology and mathematics at Sacred Heart High School, Hammersmith, London. She subsequently began work at the BBC Radio Netherlands as a journalist. There she met her future husband, Hugo Van de Perre, a Belgian journalist. [3] He was the son of the founder of De Standaard, Alfons Van de Perre. They married in 1955. When her husband died suddenly in 1979, she continued his work as a foreign correspondent. Until her retirement, Van de Perre worked as a journalist for the BBC and as a correspondent for AVRO Televizier and De Standaard. She later became a British citizen. Women who were disabled or impaired started being singled out and put into groups, said De Perre. The Nazis told them that these women did not have to work anymore-- they were gassed.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.”

When the Second World War broke out, Selma Velleman was seventeen, an intelligent girl who had hoped to go to university. She lived with her mother, two older brothers, her younger sister and her father, who worked in the theatre. Until then, being Jewish had never played a large role in her life — like many, her family were non-practising Jews. Now suddenly it became a matter of life or death. Sum- moned to register for a work camp in 1942, she managed to evade it by adopting a false identity. She became Margareta van der Kuit, Marga for short, and left her family to live undercover in Utrecht. The people housing her belonged to the resistance and before long she had joined the cause herself, forging documents and delivering them throughout the country. 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.Selma van de Perre and her son, Jocelin, during a presentation of her book at the National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam, January 9, 2020. (Cnaan Liphshiz/JTA) I speak to students so they can pass it along to their children, because I think it’s very, very important that our stories are getting through in the future so that it won’t happen [again],” she said. It only vaguely occurred to me at the time, but a young girl traveling along with a large suitcase was actually a pretty conspicuous figure,” she said in her lecture. “I’m not sure how I made it. It was just a series of close escapes.” It was in Malmo, crammed in a town hall to register, that she revealed her true identity for the first time in years. 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.