Selma van de Perre, a valiant Jewish secretary who during WWII covertly transported suitcases bulging with cash, identity cards and ration books to Dutch resistance agents, died on Oct. 20 in London. She was 103.

She was 17 when the Nazis invaded the Netherlands in May 1940. She joined the Dutch resistance, adopted aliases, and dyed her hair blond to help her pass as a non-Jew. She forged documents, helped Jewish families find shelter in Christian homes, and delivered secret papers to a contact at Nazi headquarters in Paris which she infiltrated by flirting with a German guard.

She was discovered in June 1944 and sent to the Herzogenbusch concentration camp, where she helped sabotage the gas masks that inmates were forced to make for German troops. Later, she was transferred to Ravensbrück, where she endured beatings and starvation.

After the war, she made it first to Sweden then to England, where she was reunited with her two brothers, who had served in the British army. There she learned that her father, mother, sister, grandmother, aunt, uncle and two cousins had been murdered by the Nazis.

In 1983, Mrs. van de Perre was awarded the Resistance Memorial Cross by the Dutch government. Since 1995, she had returned every year to Ravensbrück as part of a program to remind students of what had happened there.

In spite of her grievous losses, Mrs. van de Perre expressed awe in her memoir, I Am Selma, at how many people became heroes during the war. “I can still hardly believe that people who should have remained unremarkable ended up memorialized on lists and monuments” she wrote. “We were ordinary people plunged into extraordinary circumstances.”