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. Selma’s close, loving, perpetually nomadic family dispersed. One brother served in a medical unit of the Dutch military; another became a ship engineer. Selma’s father, an actor whose talents she may have inherited, was sent to a work camp. Her mother and younger sister went into hiding. There was space only for two, leaving Selma, who had barely escaped deportation to Poland, on her own.

Selma had learnt enough about the resistance to find someone who could hide her mum and sister with a family, but it was too costly for her to stay with them. During another mission, she made out with a German officer and stole documents from him to help the resistance forge Nazi papers they could use to infiltrate bases where their fighters were being kept.Being in the resistance “maybe sounds scary and dangerous, and it is, but it also gets mundane,” she said. 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. She explains: “I dyed my hair blonde and pushed everything about Selma away. I stopped thinking about my past, my family, although I worried I would talk in my sleep and give myself up. En toen..., en toen..., en toen... wordt afgewisseld met -dus- zinnetjes. Iedere redacteur heeft toch wel gehoord van " show don't tell"? En dat -dus- niet nodig is, en zelfs irritant is? Vooral in het begin had ik moeite om hier doorheen te lezen. Staccato zinnen, soms teveel feitjes en namen en kinderlijk woordgebruik. Heel zonde, want deze inhoudelijk zo belangrijke getuigenis greep mij daardoor niet zo aan als je zou verwachten met dit onderwerp.

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. New distribution cards were introduced for citizens to collect food, and the group’s plan was to use the ­identities of children who had died in infancy to collect fake papers.

Selma van de Perre is interviewed about her book at the National Holocaust Museum, Jan. 9, 2020. (Cnaan Liphshiz) This was a really interesting look at the war from the eyes of someone who truly lived it, experiences the trauma of losing family members and almost dying herself and finding ways to rebuild her life afterwards. The tone of this book is very conservational and Selma's story is an easy one to follow and understand. Her love for her family really comes through in every word she writes about them which makes it all the more heartbreaking when we know they didn't survive the war.

In 1983 Van de Perre was awarded the Resistance Memorial Cross, a medal awarded in the Netherlands to members of the Dutch resistance during the Second World War. Van de Perre is the daughter of Jewish actor, singer, and presenter Barend Velleman and Fem Spier. [3] [4] Van de Perre had two older brothers, David and Louis, and a younger sister, Clara. The family was liberal and, while Jewish, were not practicing Jews. [3] [4] Her eldest brother sailed with the Dutch Steamboat Company during the war, while her youngest brother was in England. [3] In 1942, Van de Perre was called to report to work in a fur factory that supplied the German army, but she managed to get an exemption. [4] When her father was arrested later that year and taken to Camp Westerbork, Selma helped her mother and sister go into hiding in Eindhoven. [3] Resistance [ edit ] 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. In her debut memoir, “My Name is Selma,” Van de Perre recounts sabotaging the Nazis—and enduring the Holocaust. It was a job,” Selma recalls, simply. But the stakes were terrifyingly high and near-misses frequent.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. 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.

Even as a “non-Jew” she was beaten. Desperately ill at times, she avoided hospital as few patients were kept alive. Selma van de Perre (97) doet nu pas haar verhaal over het concentratiekamp. ‘Ik gunde het de Duitsers niet dat ik doodging’. Trouw( 10 januari 2020).Geraadpleegd op 13 januari 2020.

My strategy was to flirt with the soldiers in the waiting room. They responded and gave suggestive looks, so it was clear my plan was working. 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. The Nazis however eventually caught De Perre. She was brought to the police station where she was interrogated for several days before being sent to a concentration camp in the Netherlands.