Selma van de Perre

Selma van de Perre-Velleman (7 June 1922 – 20 October 2025) was a Dutch–British resistance fighter. During the Second World War, she worked as a courier, a term that at the time acquired a specific connotation as "messenger of the resistance".

Early life Van de Perre was born in Amsterdam on 7 June 1922 the daughter of actor, singer and presenter Barend Velleman and his wife Fem Spier, who had trained as a milliner. She had two elder brothers, David and Louis, and a younger sister, Clara. The family was liberal and, while Jewish, were not practising Jews. Her elder brother sailed with the Dutch Steamboat Company during the war; her younger brother was in England. In June 1944 she was betrayed and arrested. Officials did not know of her Jewish heritage and she was interned as a political prisoner. and was not expected to survive. After recovering, now suffering from typhus and dysentery, she applied for work in the production hall of Siemens & Halske AG because conditions there were better. In April 1945 Ravensbruck was liberated by the Russian Army and through the Swedish Red Cross Van de Perre was taken to Gothenburg, where she revealed that her name was Selma Velleman. She worked with the authorities in Sweden who were helping to repatriate liberated prisoners. When she returned to the Netherlands, she learned that her parents, sister and other family members had been murdered in Auschwitz and Sobibór. She joined the Dutch section of the BBC World Service (BBC Radio Netherlands) as a journalist, where she met her future husband, Hugo van de Perre, a Belgian journalist, and became a British citizen. Until her retirement she worked as a journalist for the BBC and as a correspondent for AVRO Televizier and De Standaard.

Van de Perre visited Amsterdam every year to lay flowers on behalf of the Dutch Ravensbruck Committee. From 1995 onwards she returned to Ravensbrück for one week every year to talk about the war with Dutch and German students. At the urging of her brothers' children she began writing her autobiography, My Name is Selma, in 2003. The book was released in the Netherlands in 2020 under the title Mijn naam is Selma. She died in London on 20 October 2025, at the age of 103.