A Secret Revealed at 101: A Story that Must Be Heard

Three years ago, a 101-year-old woman from the Netherlands named Selma van de Perre released a new book called "My Name is Selma." In this book, she described her experiences during the Holocaust. It took eighty years for Selma to find the courage to share what happened to her during those harrowing times when she was a member of the Dutch resistance and later imprisoned in one of the worst concentration camps.

In recent years, her story has not only come to light but has also allowed her to return annually to Ravensbrück concentration camp, where 92,000 women were murdered, many in her presence, and share her story with visiting young people.

Selma was born in the Netherlands as Sara Wijnberg and grew up in a typical family with four children. After the German occupation of the Netherlands in 1942, her father was murdered. Her mother and sisters hid in a small shelter but were betrayed and captured after nine months. Her mother and younger sister were killed, but Selma managed to escape, dye her hair, acquire a false identity card under the name "Margareta," and try to survive.

While wandering in Leiden, she discovered the Dutch resistance. She met a group of doctors who were hiding Jews and needed help. She began handling fake documents and delivering them to people they were saving. In an act of unparalleled bravery, she traveled to Paris and entered the Gestapo headquarters to deliver a message to a collaborating Nazi officer. Disguised as a Jewish woman with forged documents, she summoned all the bravery she could muster to infiltrate the Nazi stronghold.

When she was captured and sent to Ravensbrück camp, located on the scenic route between Hamburg and the Baltic Sea, on the shores of the picturesque Lake Schwielow, the Germans did not realize her documents were fake, so she was not marked as Jewish. This likely saved her life because Jews had no chance of surviving in that brutal camp. Jewish women faced brutal medical experiments, their children were gruesomely killed, and eventually, most prisoners were burned in crematoriums they were forced to build. One especially cruel guard named Hermine Braunsteiner, nicknamed "The Mare," was infamous for her brutal whippings. The German company Siemens opened an industrial factory in the camp, where Jewish and Polish women worked to death.

The camp had a group of prisoners the Germans called the horrifying "Ravensbrück Rabbits," as they were seen as test subjects. The Germans tortured them to "study" how the body reacts to injuries, infections, and more horrific damage. Most died in agony, but a few survivors were later rehabilitated by a special organization after the war.

The non-Jewish prisoners were released by the Red Cross a week before the Germans fled, taken to Sweden, while the Jewish women were left to the "mercy" of a death march that claimed many lives. In Sweden, Selma initially gave her alias out of fear, but when she realized names were published in newspapers seeking relatives, she reverted to her original name, enabling her brother to find and reunite with her after the war.

Sixteen members of the Ravensbrück staff were sentenced to death and hanged in the two years after the war. In 1976, Simon Wiesenthal tracked down "The Mare," leading to her trial and life imprisonment. Wiesenthal noted that he found her simply through the phone book: without shame or fear, she lived openly in Austria under her full name. The Ravensbrück camp itself was later used as a communist military base until communism fell. Today, a museum stands on its grounds.

For years, Selma suppressed the horrific events she witnessed and experienced firsthand, only recently finding the ability to acknowledge, write, and speak about them.