Welcome to Litsy!

An international bestseller, this powerful, heart-wrenching memoir by a ninety-eight-year-old Jewish Resistance fighter and Ravensbrück concentration camp survivor “shows us how to find hope in hopelessness and light in the darkness” (Edith Eger, author of The Choice and The Gift). Selma van de Perre was seventeen when World War II began. She lived with her parents, two older brothers, and a younger sister. Until then, being Jewish in the Netherlands had been of no consequence. But by 1941 it had become a matter of life or death. On several occasions, Selma avoided being rounded up by the Nazis. Then, in an act of defiance, she joined the Resistance movement, using the pseudonym Margareta van der Kuit. For two years “Marga” risked it all. Using a fake ID, and passing as non-Jewish, she traveled around the country delivering newsletters, sharing information, keeping up morale—doing, as she later explained, what “had to be done.” But in July 1944 her luck ran out. She was transported to Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp as a political prisoner. Unlike her parents and sister—who, she would later discover, died in other camps—she survived by using her alias, pretending to be someone else. It was only after the war ended that she was allowed to reclaim her identity and dared to say once again: My name is Selma. Full of hope and courage, this is her story in her own words. As Selma herself says, this book was written as a testimony to our fight against inhumanity, and her page-turning, eloquent story offers a valuable new witness account of Jewish experience within the resistance movement.