"Working for the resistance, you just had to get on with it"
Selma van de Perre fought the Nazis and survived the concentration camps. Now 102, she has a remarkable tale to tell
Roger Cremers
- Sherna Noah
Add WW2: Women on the Frontline to your watchlist.
Ad
When Selma van de Perre takes a daily walk in the small garden square outside her London home, she goes unnoticed. But as a former wartime resistance fighter, 102-year-old Selma has an astonishing tale to tell.
“When I look back, I think, ‘How could I? It’s unbelievable,’” she says of her daring exploits, under the nose of the Nazis. “I’ve asked myself why I didn’t just stay in a little room, like many people in hiding, and try to survive the war that way? I’m pleased that I could do something.”
That’s quite an understatement. During the Second World War, Selma (née Velleman) undertook dangerous missions, carrying false identity papers around her Netherlands homeland, to Belgium and France. To survive, she concealed her Jewish identity, dyeing her hair blonde and adopting the identity Margareta van der Kuit, or Marga. “I had to be that person completely,” she tells me. “I was so scared that I was going to talk in my sleep.”
Selma’s exploits as a courier, carrying a large suitcase with illegal newspapers, pamphlets, as well as fake identity cards, money and food stamps for people in hiding, feature in the new Channel 4 documentary WW2: Women on the Frontline. The three-part series explores the daring and sometimes unwritten histories of the female pilots, guerrillas, journalists and spies of the conflict.
Selma, like many women in the film, lived an ordinary life before war broke out. A happy child, her Jewish identity had “never been an issue” in her homeland and she dreamt of landing a job in an upmarket Amsterdam department store. When Germany invaded the Netherlands, everything changed. “We couldn’t go as Jewish teenagers to cinemas with our other friends. You had to give up your bike and your watch,” she says. Her beloved father, a variety performer, was sent to Auschwitz, although Selma didn’t know that at the time.
I was so scared that I was going to talk in my sleep
“They said they were workcamps. We thought that for years, though people started to be curious, because no letters came back. We didn’t know Auschwitz existed.”
Selma decided that her mother and younger sister Clara must go into hiding. She found a host but was unable to pay for her own board and so, aged 20, she was left alone in Amsterdam. “To stand on your own feet so suddenly was terrible. I had to grow up straightaway.” She moved between houses, evading capture and at times, “wandered the streets like a nomad”.
After meeting members of the resistance, a few months later, Selma joined up. Her most dangerous mission involved infiltrating the German headquarters in Paris, to collect papers from a contact. Those papers helped to save the lives of Dutch resistance fighters being held and tortured at the notorious Fresnes Prison in the city, where British spies were also held.
Selma on a train in 1945 departing for London. Courtesy of Selma van de Perre/Bantam Press
Other stories of heart-pounding bravery include stealing papers from the pocket of a German officer who began flirting with Selma after taking a shine to her at a bus stop, and invited her to his home for tea. The papers could be used to enter a prison and free resistance fighters being held there.
In June 1944, not long after her 22nd birthday, Selma was arrested. Interrogated daily, she didn’t let her real name slip and was sent as a political prisoner to Ravensbrück, the women’s concentration camp, in north-east Germany.
The Nazis gassed between 5,000 and 6,000 prisoners at the camp and killed thousands more – the exact number is not known. Selma was beaten until she lost consciousness and carried out forced labour at the Siemens factory.
After eight months of terror, Selma was brought to Denmark when the camp was liberated by the Red Army in April 1945. But that was not the end of her ordeal. Selma almost died when Allied pilots bombed the Red Cross trucks, thinking they were full of German soldiers.
As a former member of the resistance and a Holocaust survivor, she says, “Life just after the war was very difficult. I did a lot of crying and I couldn’t sleep. If I slept at two o’clock in the morning, I’d wake up very shortly afterwards with nightmares… I hadn’t been able to deal with it beforehand. Working for the resistance, you just had to get on with it.” Even after getting her first taste of freedom, she was petrified to say her real name aloud, keeping it from friends. “I swallowed it, I didn’t dare say it.”
Selma would later learn the appalling news that her father, mother and sister had been murdered. Her father was killed at Auschwitz and her mother, 53, and 15-year-old sister were murdered at Sobibor, the Nazi extermination camp.
Knowing what they went through has left a devastating hole in her life: “It will stay with me until I die. My own experiences don’t seem to worry me that much. What happened to my family worries me much more.”
Selma moved to England where she would marry Belgian journalist Hugo van de Perre, have a son (now in his 50s), work for BBC Radio Netherlands, study an anthropology and sociology degree and become a teacher. “I worked a lot, kept my mind and my body busy, mentally and physically… I have learnt to use my brain and my body to try and survive.”
Selma Velleman's Dutch repatriation document. Courtesy of Selma van de Perre/Bantam Press
She revisited Ravensbrück several times to tell students her story and she wrote the international bestseller, My Name Is Selma, at the age of 98. “I did it myself,” she tells me when I ask if she dictated the words to a writer. “I wrote it on the computer, which was marvellous, because a few years ago, you’d have to do it all on the typewriter!”
Today she lives alone (Selma’s husband Hugo died in 1979) and in the days before her interview she had been to painting classes and parties. “Although I can’t see very much any more, I enjoy programmes like Countdown. It’s very good for my English, too,” she says. “Up to a few years ago, I played golf and tennis. Now, I go for walks in the afternoon, just round the square where I live. I sit down in the sun if there is some. It’s very nice. The days fly by. When people say they don’t want to get old, I say, ‘If you’re healthy enough, it’s very good.’
A woman of incredible courage, how would she like to be remembered? “For doing the things I believed in,” she says. Does she have any words of advice? “Don’t hurt other people, stand up for things, and do – don’t just talk.”
Ad
My Name Is Selma: the Remarkable Memoir of a Jewish Resistance Fighter and Ravensbrück Survivor by Selma van de Perre is available from Bantam Press
Authors
Sherna Noah
Ad
Ad
Subscribe for £1 per week
Too much to watch this autumn? Let Radio Times magazine and app do the choosing, with expert picks across TV, streaming and film.
Loading...
Ad
Loading...