Title: My Name is Selma: The Remarkable Memoir of a Jewish Resistance Fighter and Ravensbrück Survivor.
Author: Selma Van De Perre
Translators: Alice Tetley-Paul and Anna Asbury
Publisher: Scribner, 2021. Hardback edition. 225 pages. $29.95. Kindle, $12.95. (Amazon, March 11, 2021).
ISBN: 978-1-9821-6469-0
Reviewer: Arthur B. Shostak. Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Prof. Shostak is the author in 2017 of Stealth Altruism: Forbidden Care as Jewish Resistance in the Holocaust. Since his 2003 retirement from 43 years teaching sociology he has specialized in Holocaust studies. (www.stealthalturism.com).
Outstanding memoirs of Holocaust Jewish survivors, such as those by Ruth Kluger, Eva Schloss, Thomas Buergenthal, and Elie Wiesel, offer invaluable accounts of peril, resilience, and resistance. In the 2021 memoir of Selma Van De Perre, a much-honored Jewish Resistance Fighter, we share in the same culture, but from a perspective seemingly rare in this literary genre.
In 1942 as a 20-year-old underground courier, and then throughout almost three years in concentration camps, Ms. Van De Perre identified herself to fellow prisoners and enemy persecutors alike as a Gentile. To help stay unnoticed as a courier she had dyed her hair blonde and relied on her Gentile facial features. This helped her “pass,” though life included many near-death moments that undermined physical and mental health.
Holocaust scholarship has here a unique overview of what European Jews experienced under extreme duress between 1933 and 1945/46, this time from a Jewess-in-disguise, one whom, in 1983, received her country’s highest relevant civilian award, the Dutch Resistance Memorial Cross.
An analysis of Selma Van De Perre’s odyssey can identify observations well worth drawing on, some familiar from conventional memoirs, but others comparatively new.
Familiar, for example, are her salutes to ways Gentile resistors in three camps (Vught, Ravensbrück, Siemens) joined together as “Camp Sisters”: ”We supported each other. Community played such an important part in our survival. Our friends were our family.” (p.153) Similarly, she learned all to quickly at Ravensbrück not to hang on the edge of her bunkbed her washcloths and toothbrush as she had at Vught: “This was obviously very naïve – by the following morning they were all gone,” stolen by other prisoners. (p. 135)
Comparatively new insights include recall of ways of resisting, e.g., When first interrogated, she was asked if she understood German: “’No,’ I said. I could actually speak it quite well, but denying it was an act of resistance.” (p. 112) When required at Vught to make gas masks “the girl opposite me told me I wasn’t to tighten the screw too much … In this way we sabotaged as many masks as we could. Thousands, probably.” (p. 1210) On arriving from Vught into Ravensbrück, “despite the fear and uncertainty, we walked toward the camp with as much dignity as possible. Keeping our heads up was another act of defiance.” (p. 130)
In summary, we have much to learn from a Jewish resister who in her twenties “passed” herself off as an unexceptional, Gentile prisoner. Now a 98-year-old memoirist Selma Van De Perre humbly regards herself as, “just one of many people who fought against the inhumanity, and did everything they could to save as many people as possible.” (p. 199) Her book merits wide readership and long employ in Holocaust scholarship.