The story even 70-plus years later is touching. A 7-year-old’s first experience with performing ballet is met with thunderous applause, and then the harsh condemnation of a German nation wallowing in anti-Semitism. And the dream is destroyed.
Anita Dittman, whose life story is told in “Trapped in Hitler’s Hell,” a project from WND Books, and in a WND Films documentary by the same name, was interviewed recently by Jan Markell of Olive Tree Ministries.
As a Jewish girl growing up in the 1930s German she relates how she was “not quite seven years old” when her ballet instructor told her she could “dance with the big girls now.”
The audience was huge, the music began and “I felt like I was floating. I was amazed at the overwhelming applause I got,” Dittman tells Markell.
The Dittman interview, along with many others, is available on the Olive Tree Ministries website.
She said she slept that night with her “ballet slippers under my pillow.”
The reviews the next morning were on the front page of the newspaper. “Danced superbly” was the summary.
But it also said, “The German people are no longer willing to be entertained by a Jew.”
The little girl, who would become a Christian only a short time later, then descended into a time of forced labor, the loss to the camps of her mother, and worse, a story familiar to those who study the blackness that swept across the globe during Hitler era.
Her story “not only recounts the horrors of the Holocaust, but forever reveals the spiritual journey of a young Jewish teen,” said Director George D. Escobar of WND Films.
“She yearned to know God personally. And God obliges her. Her faith is tested time and again, and grows stronger and stronger as she comes to know Jesus as her savior,” he said.
Escobar said that Markell, as Dittman’s co-author, “captures perfectly the turmoil of Germany before, during, and after World War II.”
“More than that, she takes Anita’s personal narrative and makes it universal and contemporary,” he said.
“We can see history vividly through the eyewitness of Anita, and draw parallels with today’s assault on liberty and ongoing persecution of the Jews,” said Escobar.
Listen to the interview, which is airing on hundreds of stations, here, too:
[jwplayer DljsP2Oi]
