Selma van de Perre, a remarkable Jewish secretary who bravely served the Dutch resistance during World War II, passed away on October 20 in London at the age of 103. Her covert operations included transporting suitcases filled with cash, subversive newsletters, forged identity cards, and essential ration books to fellow agents, even daring to infiltrate Nazi headquarters in Paris.
The Dutch Embassy in London confirmed her passing.
Ms. van de Perre was just 19 when the Nazis invaded the Netherlands in May 1942. Within a mere four days, they swiftly subjugated a nation of fewer than nine million people. From this occupied territory, the Nazis deported more Jews—both in sheer numbers and as a percentage of the total Jewish population—than from any other country in Western Europe.
To avoid deportation to forced labor camps or worse, Ms. van de Perre initially feigned illness, then cleverly disguised herself as a nurse. Her efforts to evade capture intensified when she was recruited by a Jewish furrier in Amsterdam to produce gloves for the German Army. During this time, she joined the Dutch resistance, adopting various aliases and even dyeing her hair blond to appear non-Jewish and blend in.
“I, fortunately, was strong—physically and mentally,” she penned in her memoir, “My Name Is Selma,” published to critical acclaim in both English and Dutch in 2020, and subsequently translated into several other languages.
“I didn’t know exactly what I was capable of,” she wrote, “but I felt resilient enough—perhaps because my childhood had been something of a roller-coaster ride—to do more than just hide myself away.”
Upon the memoir’s release, Caroline Moorehead, writing for The Times Literary Supplement of London, profoundly stated that “it is impossible not to marvel at her steadiness and courage.”
Operating under the assumed names Wilhelmena Buter and Margareta van der Kuit, Ms. van de Perre fearlessly forged documents, helped Jewish families find safe havens in Christian homes, and delivered critical secret papers. On one audacious occasion, she handed documents to a contact directly at Nazi headquarters in Paris, gaining entry by flirting with the German soldiers guarding the entrance.
However, in June 1944, German police officers apprehended her in an apartment in Utrecht. She was first imprisoned at the Herzogenbusch concentration camp (known to the Dutch as Vught) in the Netherlands, where she ingeniously aided in sabotaging gas masks being manufactured by inmates for German troops.
She was subsequently transferred to Ravensbrück, located north of Berlin, which was the largest concentration camp for women in Germany. There, she endured unimaginable suffering, including brutal beatings, life-threatening diseases, starvation, and grueling forced labor in a nearby factory producing airplane components.
Her liberation came in April 1945, courtesy of the Swedish Red Cross. Yet, her journey to freedom was nearly cut short when the trucks transporting her and other prisoners were tragically mistaken for an enemy convoy and strafed by Royal Air Force fighters.
After finally reaching Sweden, and then England—where she reunited with her two older brothers who had served in the British armed forces—she was confronted with the devastating news that her father, mother, sister, grandmother, aunt, uncle, and two cousins had all been murdered by the Nazis.
Selma Velleman was born on June 7, 1922, in Amsterdam. She was the third child of Barend Levi Velleman, who, against his parents’ wishes for him to become a rabbi, pursued an acting and singing career under the stage name Ben Velmon, and Femmetje (Spier) Velleman, a skilled milliner.
While her older brothers celebrated their bar mitzvahs, the family maintained a less observant Jewish lifestyle. At the age of seven, Selma spent eight months recovering from pleurisy and pneumonia in a sanitarium. Despite this, she returned to school, excelled academically, and aspired to a career as a secretary or bookkeeper at a prestigious department store. At the time of the Nazi invasion, she was employed by a paper company.
However, on June 7, 1942, mere weeks after the invasion, she received orders to report for a labor camp in Eastern Europe. Her father was deported, and her mother and younger sister went into hiding. Soon after, Selma made the courageous decision to join the resistance movement.
The Nazis never discovered her Jewish identity; when she was captured, she was classified solely as a political prisoner.
After her liberation and reunion with her brothers in England, she embarked on a new chapter. She taught sociology and mathematics at a high school in London, pursued studies in anthropology at the London School of Economics, and joined the Dutch-language radio service of the British Broadcasting Corporation, where she would meet her future husband, Flemish journalist Hugo van de Perre.
They married in 1955 and welcomed a son, Jocelin. Following her husband’s passing in 1979, Ms. van de Perre continued her impactful work as a cultural correspondent for various media outlets and proudly became a British citizen. (Details regarding her survivors were not immediately available.)
In 1983, the Dutch government bestowed upon Ms. van de Perre the Resistance Memorial Cross, a testament to her profound bravery. Since 1995, she annually returned to Ravensbrück, participating in a vital program dedicated to educating students about the atrocities that unfolded there.
In 2021, when Christiane Amanpour, the renowned PBS news anchor, inquired if she felt bitter about the war, Ms. van de Perre offered a profound response. “Bitter?” she replied. “That’s a difficult word. No, I’m not bitter, but I don’t forgive the people who did those things, the Nazis. They were horrible people and deserved to be killed when they were killed. But I’m not bitter against the Germans. I wouldn’t be intolerant like that.”
On September 5, 1944, as she braced for transfer from Vught, 200 male inmates were brutally massacred by their Nazi guards. Yet, the very next day, as she boarded the train to Ravensbrück, she managed to maintain an astonishing sense of composure.
In her memoir, she recounted scrawling a note on a piece of toilet paper to a girlfriend, slipping it through the slats of the cattle car where she was crammed, clinging to the hope that someone would discover it and pass it along.
Fifty years later, in 1995, as that same girlfriend was moving into a new home, she stumbled upon the long-lost note. It had apparently been found near the tracks by a railroad worker and forwarded to her, but had been forgotten for half a century.
“Keep your spirits up,” the note read. “I’ll do the same, although I do wish the end was in sight.”
Despite enduring such grievous losses, Ms. van de Perre expressed profound awe in her memoir at the sheer number of ordinary individuals who rose to become heroes during the war.
“I can still hardly believe that people who should have remained unremarkable ended up memorialized on lists and monuments,” she wrote. “We were ordinary people plunged into extraordinary circumstances.”