(Jewish Group) At 97, Dutch resistance hero wants to give fellow Jewish fighters overdue recognition

Shortly after her capture by the Nazis in 1944, Dutch resistance fighter Selma van de Perre was transferred from a regular prison to the worst concentration camp in the Netherlands.

Van de Perre arrived at the infamous Camp Vught about five months after its commander, Adam Grunewald, had killed 10 women by cramming them and 64 other inmates into an unventilated, 100-square-feet cell for 14 hours. Along with the rest of the country, she had heard about what is still known here as the “bunker atrocity.”

Yet van de Perre was “pretty content” to arrive at the camp, as the 97-year-old survivor recalled last week at a lecture at the National Holocaust Museum of the Netherlands. The museum, which opened in 2017, is part of a group of five Jewish institutions in the Dutch capital known as the Jewish Cultural Quarter.

Though van de Perre is Jewish, the resistance had given her a false identity. Passing for Aryan was the only thing that kept her from the gas chamber.

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