When she was 14-years-old, Maud, Rita and their parents left the Netherlands for New York City and a fresh start in America.

She met her future husband, Hans Dahme, a German-born Christian, while working as a flight attendant for Pan Am.

Maud, “I married someone who was not Jewish, and he was an immigrant from Germany, which was a little upsetting to my parents when I brought him around, but then they realized that we were the same age, and he had been a child as I had been a child, and they could not blame him.

Together, Maud and Hans raised four children in Flemington, New Jersey. The Dahmes attended Lutheran church services. She says she feels comfortable in both religions. Yet despite that, Maud rarely spoke about her holocaust background even to her own children.

Maud, “I think a lot of things I didn't want to deal with. That it was best to not speak about it because then, you didn't have to relive it. Because the more you talk about it, the more you visualize at the same time. As you're speaking of something, you see it before your eyes, and I really didn't want to deal with it, but I realized the importance and of the older generation passing on, that it was really up to us, the children, the child survivors, so I slowly started to talk about it.

Today, Maud Dahme, former President of the NJ Board of Education, devotes her life to holocaust education. She tells her story to adults, educators and to children. Maud often takes trips to the Netherlands with groups of New Jersey Teachers through the NJ Commission on Holocaust Education. She shares her story and gives the teachers a close-up look of the people and places that she encountered during the Holocaust.