Siena (Selma) Franken was born in 1916 in Oestrich, Germany, to Dutch parents Benjamin Franken and Reintje Cohen. The family settled in Haarlem in the 1920s, where Selma later worked as a saleswoman at Gerzon. In 1937 she moved in with widower Gerard Verboom and his son Dirk, a baker, whom she married in March 1942. Only weeks later, on 16 June 1942, Selma was arrested—likely for resistance or Communist Party activity—together with Rachel Peper-Cohen Rodrigues and Manus van Praag. After detention in Amsterdam and the Oranjehotel, she was sent to Ravensbrück. In October 1942, during the “clearing” of the camp, she was deported to Auschwitz and murdered on 6 October. Her mother had died in 1941, her sister Josephine was killed in Auschwitz shortly before Selma. Dirk survived, remarried in 1945, and later ran a bookshop in Haarlem.
