An international bestseller, this powerful memoir by a
ninety-eight-year-old Jewish Resistance fighter and Ravensbrück
concentration camp survivor “shows us how to find hope in hopelessness
and light in the darkness” (Edith Eger, author of The Choice and The Gift).
Selma
van de Perre was seventeen when World War II began. She lived with her
parents, two older brothers, and a younger sister in Amsterdam, and
until then, being Jewish in the Netherlands had not presented much of an
issue. But by 1941 it had become a matter of life or death. On several
occasions, Selma barely avoided being rounded up by the Nazis. While her
father was summoned to a work camp and eventually hospitalized in a
Dutch transition camp, her mother and sister went into hiding—until they
were betrayed in June 1943 and sent to Auschwitz. In an act of defiance
and with nowhere else to turn, Selma took on an assumed identity, dyed
her hair blond, and joined the Resistance movement, using the pseudonym
Margareta van der Kuit. For two years “Marga” risked it all. Using a
fake ID, and passing as non-Jewish, she traveled around the country and
even to Nazi headquarters in Paris, sharing information and delivering
papers—doing, as she later explained, what “had to be done.”
But in July 1944 her luck ran out. She was transported to Ravensbrück
women’s concentration camp as a political prisoner. Without knowing the
fate of her family—her father died in Auschwitz, and her mother and
sister were killed in Sobibor—Selma survived by using her alias,
pretending to be someone else. It was only after the war ended that she
could reclaim her identity and dared to say once again: My name is Selma.
“We
were ordinary people plunged into extraordinary circumstances,” Selma
writes. Full of hope and courage, this is her story in her own words.
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