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By Selma van de Perre; translated by Alice Tetley-Paul and Anna Asbury
Scribner, 224 pages, $27
And still the stories keep coming.
At 98, Selma van de Perre has published her first book, a memoir about her activities in the Dutch Resistance and her ordeals at Ravensbrück concentration camp.
It has taken her a long time to be able to look back. Now that she has, the most appropriate response is gratitude – for her survival, her mostly fulfilling postwar life, and the details she adds to our remorselessly accumulating knowledge of the period.
There are no literary flourishes in “My Name is Selma.” This is a book one reads for its story, related with directness and simplicity. Selma’s self-portrait is of a woman of courage and heart, who took great risks and suffered greatly, too but whose luck, cleverness and resilience saw her through.