She found herself delivering what she called “illegal papers” for the resistance around Holland and in other European countries. She also transported money used for the cause and also to pay families which housed Jews hiding from persecution. 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.

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. Selma van de Perre-Velleman ( Amsterdam, 7 juni 1922) is een Nederlands-Britse verzetsstrijder. Zij werkte in de Tweede Wereldoorlog als koerierster.But the Netherlands also had the highest death rate among Jews in Nazi-occupied Western Europe, a figure reached in no small part due to the collaboration of local “Jew hunters,” who were paid for each Jew they delivered to the Nazis. In her book, an English version of which is due to be published in September, van de Perre describes the fear of being recognized by one of them on the street. In 1942, when I was 20, I was called up to go to a work camp. My father said, “No, you don’t go,” and he gave me some chocolate that made me go to the toilet all the time. He called the doctor, who wrote me a note. I soon went to work in a fur factory, making gloves and things for German soldiers in the East. But then my father got his call-up to go to a work camp. I said to my mother, “We have to go into hiding.”

In recent weeks we heard about a story that was almost as remarkable as Ariana’s. It belonged to ninety-eight year-old Dutch Holocaust survivor called Selma van de Perre. Selma was just eighteen years-old when World War Two began. Her family were members of th populous Jewish community in Holland. Until 1940 this had been of little consequence, but in the aftermath of the Nazi invasion they were targeted for deportation. 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.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. Even as a “non-Jew” she was beaten. Desperately ill at times, she avoided hospital as few patients were kept alive.

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. Selma van de Perre sagt am Ende des Buches, dass sie dieses Buch geschrieben hat, damit man nicht vergisst. Dieses Schreiben gegen das Vergessen finde ich unglaublich wichtig und bemerkenswert. Ich kann nur immer wieder betonen, dass es bald keine lebenden Zeitzeug*innen der Shoah mehr geben wird. Deshalb ist ein Buch wie "Mein Name ist Selma" so wichtig. Wir müssen diese Zeitzeugenberichte lesen. Wir dürfen nicht vergessen. Wir dürfen nicht vergeben. Selma's love of her family, her friends and her country runs through this book, and that love clearly remains. I would love to meet her. I have Jewish heritage and am extremely proud of this, the fate of my father's relatives is unknown to me, it was something no one spoke of. There just isn't the words to thank this amazing woman for her tenacity and devotion to the lives of others. I definitely think Selma kept the readers at arm's reach in this book, and I'm not sure if I really understood who she was deep down (for example Edith Eger's The Choice, I really felt like I knew Edith and her personality). But also I find this extremely understandable as Selma is telling us about an extremely traumatic time in her life that she might not want to deep dive into too much,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. After her liberation, Selma reunited with her brother, David, in London, where she worked at the Dutch Embassy. She has also worked as both a teacher of sociology and mathematics, and a BBC journalist. Mrs van de Perre moved to the UK in 1945 at the behest of the Dutch Ministry of War and met her husband, the journalist Hugo van De Perre, while working at the BBC. She later became a teacher. This story has been held by Selma for decades, it's a story that should be heard and a book that should be available in every secondary school. De Perre said she considers it very important her and other holocaust survivors to speak out and tell their story to the coming generations.