Maud Dahme, who was hidden as a child during the Holocaust by Christian rescuers, speaks as another former hidden child, Renee Kuker, looks on during a Yom Hashoa program at Temple Beth El of Somerset.
Photo by Debra Rubin
May 06, 2008
Maud Dahme and Renee Kuker were deprived of their childhoods and religion by the Nazis, but were saved by the actions of strangers.
On April 30 they came to Temple Beth El of Somerset to share their stories and commemorate Yom Hashoa.
They were introduced by Peppy Margolis, director of the Institute of Genocide and Holocaust Studies at Raritan Valley Community College in North Branch and herself a child of Holocaust survivors.
Margolis stressed the value of publicizing the stories of the “hidden children.”
Kuker, a native of Krakow, Poland, now living in Bridgewater, was two years old when her wealthy parents left her with a Catholic peasant family. They never returned.
Baptized and given a new name, like other such hidden children, Kuker knew her life “depended on our silence.”
“Out of the one million Jewish children in Poland prior to the war, only 5,000, or one-half of one percent, survived,” Kuker said.
Kuker was six when the war ended. Shortly after, a couple showed up in the village.
The man was her father’s younger brother. He and his wife survived the camps and came to reclaim their niece. They recognized Renee, who bore a striking resemblance to her dead father, immediately.
“I ran away,” recalled Kuker. “I was afraid of Jews.”
The Polish family refused to give her up without getting money they had been promised by Kuker’s parents. After a court fight, Renee’s aunt and uncle received custody of her on condition that she would be raised Catholic. Her new parents abided by that decision until Kuker herself asked to stop going to church and return to the faith of her birth.
The family moved to Paris and Frankfurt before coming to the United States. Today Kuker has two children and five grandchildren.
‘Inside, we’re all the same.’
Dahme, a Dutch native living in Flemington, was six when she was sent with her four-year-old sister to the home of Christian rescuers by their parents.
Dahme related that as members of the Jewish community were being herded into the Vesterbrook transit camp, her parents received a letter telling them to come to the synagogue for instructions.
Her Orthodox parents had an uneasy feeling and stopped at the home of a Christian friend. Fortunately, they were with the underground and immediately offered to hide the girls with a Christian family. Her parents were sheltered by other Christians.
“How difficult it must have been for my parents to know they might never see their children again,” said Dahme, who was whisked with her sister through woods and by train by underground members.
They were taken in by a childless couple in their 60s who passed them off as their young nieces who had come to escape the bombing in the city.
Unlike Kuker’s rescuer, the Dahmes’ caretakers were motivated by compassion. But like Kuker, the sisters gave up their names and identities, calling their rescuers aunt and uncle as part of the deception.
The family also took in a Jewish teenage boy. It was young Maud’s job to bring him his meals in the underground quarters they had created for him.
At age nine she was reunited with her parents and the religion she too had all but forgotten. The family immigrated to the United States where Dahme grew up to be president of the state Board of Education. She remains a member of the NJ Holocaust Education Commission.
A one-hour documentary on Dahme’s life, The Hidden Child, was produced for New Jersey Network two years ago. It will be shown on NJN stations at 10 p.m. on Thursday, May 8.
Dahme, also a mother and grandmother, remains troubled that despite the millions murdered in the Holocaust, genocides keep recurring.
“It happened in Bosnia and Rwanda and now there is a genocide happening in Darfur,” she said. “So many good people cared and risked their lives. They were Christians and we were Jews, but they above all were human beings. I tell schoolchildren this all over. Despite your religious or ethnic differences, if your friend has different hair or eyes, inside we’re all the same. Maybe someday through our youth we will realize this.”
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