Selma van de Perre, n'e Velleman, was born in the Netherlands on 7 June 1922 to liberal Jewish parents. The Velleman family had four children and lived in Amsterdam. When the Netherlands was occupied by the Germans in 1940 and news of persecution and arrests of Jewish families piled up, Selma decided to go into hiding in 1942. She was able to hide with various acquaintances and friends. In the same year she moved to Leiden. There, she found shelter in the house of Antje Holthuis. When Selma realised that Antje was part of a group of Dutch resistance fighters, she offered her help. Selma managed to get papers with the Christian name of Margaret van der Kuit. Under that name she carried out courier work the Dutch resistance, delivering letters, reports, food stamps, and false identity papers across Holland. At one point, she even travelled to Paris. On her travels through the Netherlands, she supplied resisters with monthly leaflets, money and food stamps. The resistance gave Selma a room in Utrecht in June 1943, where she was arrested in 1944. She was then taken to the prison of Amsterdam for questioning. However, her true identity was not discovered and she was transferred to the Dutch Vught concentration camp. On 8 September 1944, she and other women from Vught were taken to the Ravensbr'ck concentration camp, where she worked as a slave labourer for Siemens. After eight months, Selma was liberated by the Swedish Red Cross on 23 April 1945 and first brought to Denmark and then Sweden. Four months later, she was able to return to Amsterdam, where she stayed with a friend she knew from childhood. After a few weeks, she was asked by the Dutch Ministry of War to go to the UK, where her two brothers lived. After some time, she joined the BBC radio department for a while, where she worked for eight years. There she met her future husband. While working as a broadcaster, she fulfilled her dream and began a four-year study of anthropology and sociology and subsequently became a teacher. After the death of her husband, the journalist Hugo van de Perre, Selma became a foreign correspondent for Dutch media. She also became actively involved in the work on the history of forced labour and was a regular guest at the Generation Forum of the Ravensbr'ck Memorial. In 2019, her memoir, 'My name is Selma' came out in Holland to critical acclaim and the book was published in English in 2020.