How No.66947 became Selma again

Living in the Netherlands for the best part of ten years, I only occasionally encountered traces of its wartime past. Once a year, out of some sense of duty, I would visit the British and Commonwealth cemetery in Oosterbeek, where Allied casualties of the Battle of Arnhem are buried. Each gravestone tells its own story of one of the most tragic episodes of the latter stages of the Second World War.

When German forces invaded in 1940, they were not only annexing another neighbouring country they were adding another key territory from which to launch attacks - and, an eventual invasion - on Britain. The Dutch paid a terrible price. In the aftermath of Arnhem, even with the Allies moving further into Europe after D-Day, the Nazi occupation grew ever-more brutal, with starvation and fuel shortages rife during the winter of 1944. The occupation - at times as fanatical as anywhere in the Third Reich - lasted until the ultimate German surrender in May 1945.

As such, the Dutch commemorate their war history with both sobriety and celebration, even now. Every May, the 4th is a sombre day of remembrance, Dodenherdenking, with a grand ceremony on Amsterdam's Dam Square attended by the Dutch royal family, the government and other dignitaries. At 8pm in the evening, the country falls silent. The following day, the 5th, is Bevrijdingsdag, a much livelier celebration of freedom.

In Amsterdam, as you walk or cycle around the centre you are bound to come across the remarkable Anne Frank House, the living museum which depicts arguably one of the most famous - and infamous - stories of the Nazi persecution of Dutch Jews during the Second World War, a persecution that decimated some three-quarters of the Jewish population. I remember hearing stories of life during occupation from an older colleague of mine at Philips, who was a young boy during the German occupation. Some of his tales were almost comical, when told from a child’s perspective: one in particular was about him being given a toy drum for a birthday, and then having to keep it quiet as his family went into hiding, moving from house to house as the authorities closed in on them. Others were less amusing, but they fascinated me with their unique perspective on life under brutal subjugation, an alternative view of war than that imparted by my own parents who were children growing up at the same time in Britain, and under very different conditions on the home front.

Another perspective has arrived in the form of My Name Is Selma, the remarkable memoir of the sprightly, articulate Selma van de Perre. Now 98, her book tells the story of what happened to Jews and other persecuted minorities in the Netherlands, but framed by her own experience as a member of the Dutch resistance. Selma was 17 when the war began, and once the Nazis commenced their programme of arresting Jews and deporting them to concentration camps, Selma successfully managed to evade capture, much in the same manner as my late colleague and his family did. Eventually, she joined the resistance and, working as an agent under the name ‘Marga’, took part in missions to disseminate underground information. Luck played a major part in her work. In one mission, she went to Paris to exchange documents with a resistance spy based at the Nazi headquarters. Today, she says it was a mission she just got on with, "without thinking about if you have ideals,” she told the Dutch newspaper Het Parool earlier this year. “You can't just talk about them. We were also naive.”

That luck ran out in 1944 when she was arrested as a political criminal, her Jewish heritage still hidden, and sent first to the Dutch transit camp at Vught near Eindhoven (which wasn’t without its atrocities), before being moved to Ravensbrück in northern Germany, a camp almost exclusively for female prisoners. There she remained defiant, continuing to use her adopted name rather than her own, only reclaiming her real identity when the war ended and the camp liberated. There is, however, no doubting that life in Ravensbrück was hell, and at one point a prison doctor even thought she was close to death. “I refused to give the Germans their way,” Selma said to Het Parool. “I clung to thin threads of life and eventually made it.

Selma van de Perre and Louise Minchin on BBC Breakfast

Today, even at the age of 98, she is anything but clinging to life. Interviewed last week on BBC Breakfast by Louise Minchin she appeared remarkably robust, articulately speaking in perfect English - as the Dutch tend to do - the result of having lived in London since the end of the war when she landed a job at the Dutch embassy. "Every day I am happy to be alive,” she says today. She continues to live independently (her husband, Belgian journalist Hugo van de Perre, died in 1979), still cooks for herself and does her own shopping. Even now, she’s the very picture of defiance. “Until recently I played golf, but I stopped,” she told the Dutch newspaper. “I thought it was getting a bit too dangerous. You know, if you fall as an old person and you break something, then you're done.”

Things first became dangerous for Selma after the German invasion of the Netherlands in May 1940. As Jews, Selma’s family were designated second-class citizens. Two years later her father was captured and deported to be murdered in Auschwitz in December 1942. Her grandmother, uncles and aunts, nephews and nieces also suffered the same fate. The following  July 1943 her mother and teenage sister were arrested in Eindhoven where they were hiding. Selma didn't hear anything from them again. They, too, were executed almost immediately on arrival at the Sobibor death camp.

Motivated by her family’s fate and inspired by the self-sacrifice of a young activist who’d committed suicide rather than betray compatriots, Selma threw herself into working for the resistance. “They were short of young people, so I said yes.” Taking the name Marga from a dead non-Jewish baby, Selma’s work for the resistance took her all over the country, riding her luck throughout. Her eventual arrest on 18 June, 1944, two weeks after D-Day, led to a continuous fight for life in Ravensbrück, where she assigned to the ‘aisle of death’ part of the camp and known only by the number 66947. Nearly 100,000 women and children died at the camp, from a combination of executions, hunger and disease. Many were subjected to medical experiments, torture and hard labour. “It was three to four people to one bed,” Selma revealed. “Thousands slept on the floor.”

The camp’s liberation brought more than just physical freedom for Selma. In Malmö, where Swedish diplomats had taken freed prisoners, she was asked her name. “Margareta van der Kuit,” she said at first, using her adopted name, before realising that her identify should be restored: “My name is Selma. Selma Velleman [her maiden name].”

Selma van de Perre in London, 195
Picture: Selma van de Perre

“People still ask me why the Germans never found out my real identity,” she says today. “As Marga, I never raised any questions. That has been my luck.” Like most Dutch people, Selma retains a profound sense of pragmatism about her wartime adventures. “I took the right decision at the right time several times,” she says, and also didn’t stop to think about sacrifices. In Ravensbrück she found food for a pregnant women: “No matter how good it smelled, how hungry I was, I never ate any of it.”

Today, Selma's memories are lucid, and the book gathers together in fascinating detail the events of almost 80 years ago. She became a journalist after her husband - himself a Belgian correspondent - passed away, writing for the Belgian newspaper De Standaard, amongst others. Settling in London and taking British citizenship, she started work, "reluctantly," on her remarkable story. “I didn't really want to,” she says, but her brother’s children convinced her otherwise. “‘You must write it down’, they said. ‘You are the last of that generation still alive’.”

Still, though, the writing process didn’t come easily, bringing back many disturbing memories, especially of the disappearance of her own mother and sister. “When I lie awake at night or early in the morning, I think about them,” Selma revealed to Het Parool. “Then I wonder what they experienced in the cattle wagon on their very last trip. You remember that image until you die.”

In the book she writes: "Inside me is a terrible hole that will never heal. In my head I construct in the most horrible detail what has been done to them. I wonder if Mum and Clara knew what was going on, those two lovely, innocent people who had never hurt anyone. I wonder if they were holding hands when they died; I wonder if Dad was thinking about us in his last seconds, or if he panicked too much to think about anything. Even now, 75 years later, I lie awake at night and say to myself, 'Selma, go to sleep; you can't change what happened just by thinking about it'. ”

Despite her age, Selma continues to be active in maintaining public consciousness of the grim piece of human history that is the Holocaust. Every year she lays a wreath at the Women of Ravensbrück memorial on Amsterdam’s Museumplein. She has also given lectures to students at Ravensbrück. Her story isn’t just about what happened to her fellow Jews in the Nazi camps but what happened to those who were able to return home: “Don't forget the cold reception for survivors when they returned to the Netherlands,” she says. “Nobody was interested in what had happened to us.” Selma’s book not only celebrates the true identify she denied herself while working for the Dutch resistance, but also the point that Dutch Jews weren’t rendered entirely helpless by their persecution. “In reality, countless Jews worked with non-Jews together in the resistance – much more than we knew during the war,” Selma writes in her book. “Often, it was assumed that Jews who escaped deportation immediately went into hiding but that wasn’t always the case. It wasn’t in the interest of Jews to be identified as such. This explains to a large degree why so few Jews had been recognized for their actions.”

“I was one of many Jewish people to fight the Nazi regime and my story illustrates what happened to thousands of Jews and non-Jews alike,” she says of her book. “I have recorded the small details that made up our lives, the sheer luck that saved some of us and the atrocities that lead to the deaths of so many. This book is written as a testament to our fight against the inhumanity. The horrors of the Second World War and the bravery of the people who defied them must never be forgotten. I hope this book will contribute to their lasting memory.” It certainly does. What a remarkable woman.

We’ve got so much to be thankful for

The contrasts couldn’t be greater. 75 years ago, thousands of people thronged into central London and other cities, towns and villages to wave flags and, crammed together, sang, danced and embraced. Today there will be none of that. Not for want of celebrating 75 years since victory in Europe was declared, but because we can’t. Save for a few patriotic neighbourhoods who rarely need an excuse to get out the bunting and have a street party, the lockdown has muted, somewhat, the VE Day commemorations.

But before anyone carps, some perspective. Yes, it’s a drag that we can’t celebrate en masse; yes, it’s frustrating that there is a stilted atmosphere to the day that not even a Red Arrows flypast will lift. For some of us, there is little change on the horizon from being confined to base and in some cases of extreme medical risk, confined to quarters with clinical shielding applied. But whatever inconvenience and even financial hardships COVID-19 is bringing - and an existential threat that this represents - 8 May, 1945 should put it into some perspective.

450,000 Britons lost their lives in World War Two, including those fighting in Europe, Africa and the Pacific theatres, as well as those on the home front, enduring almost six years of the Luftwaffe’s bombs and Hitler’s V rockets. When the war formally ended after the Japanese surrender in August 1945, the financial sacrifice made by Britain in its defence of liberty had been enormous. Even taking into account the material support that came the UK’s way from the United States, Britain was financially crippled. Post-war national debt peaked in the late 1940s to more than 230% of GDP. 

The hardships of wartime rationing on the home front were met by conscripts returning from the war to face unprecedented difficulties that pale into insignificance even when compared to the bleak outlook we face today. Indeed, in 1945, it would be many, many years before the hardships receded, with rationing continuing well into the 1950s. Out of that period, however, emerged the National Health Service, the very institution we now stand on our doorsteps applauding every Thursday evening. The period after the war also produced the longest - and continued - era of global peace and, eventually, prosperity. Organisations like the UN came about. You could even argue that NATO was created to provide a potent buffer to any renewed military ambition from the east. While some of that - particularly the prosperity - may have been arrested by the coronavirus, the optimist must conclude that we will not be in lockdown forever. A recession, predicted to be the worst in 300 years by the Bank of England, may be over faster than any in living memory (though the scars will take longer to heal).

I guess I’m saying that we may still be at the 1941 stage of this pandemic, with no end in sight and an attrition rate ruthlessly keeping us at home (even if the trend is downward, deaths are still equivalent to at least one loaded jumbo jet crashing every single day...). But we have to believe that the summer of 1945 will be here soon. Optimism, even if it was fuelled by a cocktail of patriotic fervour and government propaganda, kept the country going during the Second World War. Today we celebrate and commemorate the incredible suffering of everyone who lived through and fought in that conflict. I think of my own parents (especially my dad who probably only missed a call-up by a couple of years) as teenagers, denied all of the freedoms today’s teens still enjoy, even in the current circumstances. I think of the D-Day soldiers who never made it to the Normandy shore, the Lancaster bomber crews who had a one-in-three chance of coming home alive, and the sailors on Atlantic convoys risking all to bring in vital supplies. And I think of everyone back home who went to work, took on factory jobs and literally put their backs into keeping the country alive. It may sound trite, but we really do have so much to be thankful for.

I have lived in the Netherlands and in France, and have always found fascinating their attitudes to the war. The Dutch, in particular, have two events to commemorate their occupation by the Nazis, and the unfathomable suffering they were subjected to (just look at their war in late 1944 when the Allies were supposedly moving through occupied Europe, and yet the Dutch were being effectively starved to death as the last front of rearguard German defiance). On 4 May, the Netherlands holds its herdenking day (remembrance of the dead), a very sombre commemoration of people who’ve died in all conflicts, including the 70% of the pre-war Dutch Jewish population murdered by the Nazis). On 5 May, the Dutch celebrate Bevrijdingsdag - Liberation Day - a far more colourful and joyous occasion which, as the name suggests celebrates the end of the tyrannous occupation. These two days were always a reminder to me of what the UK escaped, even if that escape came at an incredible price. Life in wartime Britain was one of permanent darkness. Dad’s Army might caricature the stiffened upper lips of bucolic Warmington-on-Sea, but it rarely captured the extent of austerity, of making-do, of living, literally, off meagre rations. Now we’re past the initial madness of toilet paper shortages and tinned tomatoes going missing at least our supermarkets are stocked, Deliveroo will bring a family feast to the doorstep at the touch of an app, and with some obvious exceptions, we are comfortable. We have so much to be thankful for today.

The tea really does taste better, and other observations

© Simon Poulter 2016

So, I’ve been back in London just over a month, after 17 and a half years living abroad, which is a statement that, I know, carries a whiff of the exotic. However, I'm not suggesting for one minute that I've been off-grid, khaki-clad with a pith helmet, observing still-primitive Amazonian tribes, or carrying out a long-term study of penguins in their natural habitat, or in my wilder moments of Walter Mittydom, living the rock star lifestyle in a Malibu hacienda, occasionally doing something with gated reverb.

No, for most of those years away I've been sat in an office. Furthermore, I've hardly been cut off from my homeland. Frequent commando raids to visit family, friends, Stamford Bridge and carry out sundry business commitments, more or less in that order, have kept me in regular contact. That said, there is a substantial difference between weekend trips to the home island and living somewhere day-to-day (or, simply, "living", as I had been doing exclusively in Britain before being coaxed elsewhere).

Of course, moving to the Netherlands - and subsequently California, back to the Netherlands again and then France - as I did, wasn't exactly volunteering for the first manned Mars mission. These countries do, I established quite quickly, have flushing toilets, and if you know where to look, shops selling Marmite. But coming back has thrown a spotlight on things I had missed, or more importantly, didn't know I'd missed.

With worldly-wiseness comes additional awareness of your home country and recognition of things you'd never have been conscious of before moving abroad, or that you suddenly become aware has become a thing while you've been away. Here, I offer my first observation: cars pushing into traffic from side roads. I honestly don't recall this ever being a custom (interestingly enough, in Holland cars coming out of a side road have right-of-way, which I didn't know until it was almost too late…the first time). During my driving lessons I was taught to wait until there was a break in the traffic and then pull out. Now the norm seems to be to simply stick the nose of your car out, forcing others to stop. And often the driver in question is actually trying to blag his or her way onto the other side of the road, forcing traffic on both sides to stop. I don't know when or where this came from, or why. It's possible that it is simply a consequence of Britain's roads becoming ever more congested, as property, demographics and population increases - including net immigration - have put more cars on the streets. Another good reason for me to eschew car ownership and make use of public transport, a trait I warmly embraced in Paris, and am happy to continue as I base myself in south-east London.

This brings me to my second observation: the sense of entitlement. I blame Simon Cowell. For many things, actually. At risk of committing the most middle-aged thing I've ever written, Britain has, in the years I've been at large, developed an assumption of on-demand, instantaneous everything, from Cowell's drive-through fame culture to 18-year-old footballers skipping the traditional cleaning-the-stadium-toilets-with-a-toothbrush apprenticeship and going straight to Range Rover ownership. And don't get me going on compensation.

With this entitlement comes an erosion of civility, something the Brexit referendum seems to have accelerated, with social media becoming the prime medium to tell complete strangers exactly what is thought of them. There is some credence to the argument that if Gary Lineker or Lily Allen tweet about refugees they are putting themselves out there, and that their freedom to express themselves is rightfully matched by those who dare to troll them. But, as I’ve blogged before, spend any time on Twitter and, much like the bubbling stream of bile that is the Daily Mail and its unhinged, tin-foil hat-wearing, demonstrably illiterate readership, you will succumb to both madness and despair at how people, shielded by their keyboard and the semi-anonymity of their handle, feel entitled to say whatever the want without consequence, and without any basis of a relationship to so.

This manifests itself, post-Brexit, with Polish community centres being vandalised, hijab-wearing Muslim women being verbally abused in town centres, and knuckle-dragging thugs staging protests about claiming their country back, not that I ever noticed that it had been taken away from them. And, guess what? After Tuesday's presidential earthquake, it's happening in America, too. Let right-wing populism win, and all of a sudden there are those acting like it's 1933 Germany, when brown was the in-vogue shirt colour.

When I left Britain in 1999 there was no such thing as social media. If you wanted to complain you either wrote to Jimmy Young, Points Of View or The Times. If you wanted to rant at complete strangers there was always Speaker’s Corner. Now, you can meltdown, Basil Fawlty-style, on Twitter. Which I did, without remorse, recently when trying to get broadband installed. Broadband providers go to great lengths to draw you in with slick marketing: TV ads with Hollywood celebrities and websites that connect you to directly via chat to experts helping you pick the right package. And then the horror begins: after handing over a large sum of money, you then wait for the service to begin. Except it doesn’t, so you connect by online chat again…where it takes half an hour for someone to take up your case, only to inform you that another department handles your type of package and you should call their helpdesk. Which you do, and you then spend an hour on hold due to “a high volume of calls”. In my case, I clocked up a full three hours on hold trying to find out why BT had arbitrarily cancelled the visiting installation engineer, and then cancelled my order altogether. Here Twitter comes into its own. It’s amazing how responsive companies become when their reputation is challenged publicly. It shouldn’t be like this, of course. You should just be able to call a number and someone answers, more or less straight away. Britain’s population may have grown in recent years, but not so much that some of a telecommunications provider’s substantial profits can’t be invested in extra customer support personnel.

There are many more line items I could complain about the Britain I’ve returned to, from London’s choked, gridlocked traffic, to those Estuary accents where each sentence ends with a rising pitch like a question?, to jogging bottoms as workwear, young women wearing make-up applied by an industrial sandblaster (and eyebrows which may have been drawn with an extra thick Sharpie), to Nando's. But that could sound ungallant about my return, which would be wrong.

Throughout my time abroad I’ve eulogised about my adopted surroundings. Amsterdam remains an adorable village masquerading as a national capital. California will always be where I go for sunny people and sunny weather in a geography that offers cities as majestic as San Francisco and as relaxed as San Diego, and the eye candy of its beaches, mountains and deserts, of Lake Tahoe and Yosemite. And Paris. What can I say that I haven’t already? An architectural history museum that you can actually live in, with subsidised public transport and the amusement of people watching without being judged for it.

But it's not for nothing that for some time I’ve wanted to come back to London. For a vibrancy matched only by New York; for its culture, its art, music, exhibitions and theatre; for its diversity; for its ability to blend modernity with traditionalism; for the sense of newness I keep finding around every corner, nestled amongst the old; for the joy of taking a Thames Clipper to the football; for tea that really does taste better; for breaking my umbilical cord with the south-western suburbs I grew up in and welcoming me to the south-east of the capital.

As much as there is a degree of architectural vandalism going in London, with the rapid forestation of huge, new towers of glass and steel dominating the skyline, there is also an unshakeable excitement about the place that I notice and experience every day I step outside. Even post-Brexit, with the banks and other corporate institutions supposedly buggering off to Frankfurt and Amsterdam, London feels as resilient today as ever before. It’s new mayor, Sadiq Khan, is a force for good, putting himself about on the world stage in an enthusiastically statesmanlike manner, declaring the British capital open. If he could do something about the traffic, Heathrow and the epidemic of knife crime, he would be somewhere close to the country’s best politician (and certainly more effective than either the leadership of the party he represents or the self-serving scoundrels they are supposed to be in opposition to).

All this aside, I'm not going to make melodrama out of my repatriation. Really, there hasn’t been a lot to it. Essentially, I arrived, and then went straight down the pub. It has all been relatively easy - as really I should have expected, though that’s not to say there have been things to get used to again, not to mention things to do for the very first time. But I’ll be honest, the star of all this has been London.

I'm writing this in New York, the self-styled ‘greatest city in the world’, a description much like The Rolling Stones being the world’s greatest rock and band. If so, then London runs it close on many points, and even beats it on others. Kind of like The Who, The Kinks and Led Zeppelin. It really is good to be back.