The Applegate-Dorros Peace and International Understanding Award, named for the legendary NEA President Irvamae Applegate and Staff Consultant Sidney Dorros, honors those committed to motivate youth to work towards world peace. This year’s recipient, veteran educator Maud Peper Dahme, is the living, breathing symbol of “peace through understanding”.
Maud Dahme has dedicated her life to enlightening young people about intolerance, and taking a stand against it. She comes by this honestly; the Holland-born Ms. Dahme is a Holocaust survivor.
The German occupation of Holland forced Jewish children to leave public schools, interrupting the natural flow of Ms. Dahme’s studies. Her family was eventually ordered to detention camps, but due to the humanitarian intervention of those connected to the Underground, they were given harbor in safe houses, but unfortunately the children were separated from their parents.
These early experiences of isolation, starvation, and bearing witness to terror shaped what would ultimately be Ms. Dahme’s life mission. After emigrating to New Jersey in 1950, she served over twenty years as a member of the New Jersey Board of Education. During her five year tenure as president, she instituted groundbreaking Holocaust education curricula, not only so that students have a clear understanding, but so instructors develop effective methods to engage young people about oppressive forces here and abroad.
Ms. Dahme was a consistent member of the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education, and also served as chair of the Interstate Migrant Education Council where she championed equal access to educational opportunity for the children of migrant workers.
At the age of eighty-nine, Ms. Dahme continues to be a very active member of New Jersey Commission of Holocaust Education, ensuring that the Holocaust not be forgotten by teaching students to accept differences through her story of survival… and what happens when a country stripped of their civil rights.
As a member of the New Jersey Education Association, Ms. Dahme participates in summer teacher seminars, visiting concentration camp sites across multiple countries to make the horror not an abstract, but “real talk”.
In 2015, Maud published her memoirs, Chocolate, the Taste of Freedom: The Holocaust memoir of a Hidden Dutch Child. Ms. Dahme’s story was featured in a PBS documentary and at the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. She also is a three-time breast cancer survivor. In 2014, she was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame as an “Unsung Hero.”
Those unaware of the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat it. Maud Dahme is painfully aware of the past, but committed to using education to ensure it’s never repeated.
