Passing Words: Selma van de Perre

This was the first time the angel had been silenced in its immortality, and it paused with a sense of wonder. The soul, placing a solitary finger up, closed its eyes and asked for a moment. "You cannot know," it said (after a time), "how loud human suffering truly is; I want to drink in this quiet and this lightness for it is untainted by crushing despair, and I never thought such a thing could be." The angel bowed its head and simply stood there, motioning for the others to stand back - the ones who longed to thank her for their hope and, in some cases, their very lives.

(In memory of Selma van de Perre, a Jewish secretary who posed as a German during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands (subjugating nine million people in four days). Ms. van de Perre avoided detection and deportation masquerading as a nurse (adopting aliases and dyeing her hair blonde) while she aided the Dutch Resistance helping others to escape. Once discovered, Selma was sent to Herzogenbusch and then to Ravensbruck, a concentration camp for women, and led the others in a secret campaign of sabotaging the gas masks they were forced to make. Selma van de Perre is quoted as saying, "We were ordinary people plunged into extraordinary circumstances". She passed in London at the age of 103.)