Monday, February 02, 2015

Remarkable comments from Christian-Jewish Holocaust survivor

Anita Dittman was born to a Jewish mother and a Gentile father in pre-Hitler Germany. It appears that her parents divorced when she was young. Her mother, sister, and she converted to Christianity when she was a child under the influence of a local (I surmise Lutheran) pastor. Her sister escaped Germany before the Holocaust, but when Anita was a teenager she and her mother were rounded up for their Jewish ethnicity and sent to the camps separately. Anita has a story which sounds quite remarkable (as Holocaust survivor stories tend to be) about how she and her mother survived and were eventually reunited.

For many years Anita Dittman has told her story in U.S. public schools, but recently the schools are refusing to let her speak because she insists on discussing her Christianity, which helped her through the horrors of what she experienced and helped her to forgive her captors.

One school administrator at a high school in northern Minnesota contacted her with an invitation to speak, saying she came highly recommended by some students who had heard her speak previously.
"I called him back and left a message and said I would be honored. Just let me know the date and time, and I will be there,” Dittman said.
"I said, I have to tell you, though, that Christ is in my message.”
“Well can’t you leave Christ out of it?” the man asked.
“He is the one who kept me safe. I can’t keep Him out,” Dittman responded.
“Well, I’m sorry then. You can’t come,” he said.
Many other doors have closed at the mention of the “C” word.
Says Dittman, “It’s getting worse, I tell you....It’s so dictating to the parents now. This is how it started in Russia and Germany.”

Dittman is concerned about the direction things are going in the West. She was asked

what, if anything, Christians should be doing to prepare for the day when the “soft” persecution becomes hard, like it did in Germany.
"The importance of faith in God would be the one thing, and the courage to speak up,” she said. “I tell some of my students I speak to, even in secular schools, keep the faith. You can lose your homes, your schools, everything, but if you have your faith, you have everything.”
“Pray to God that when the times come, He will be with you and will see you through. Also memorize scripture because you may not always have a Bible,” she said. “I lost my Bible during the Russian occupation, but God will remind you of the verses you need when you are in a situation where you are totally dependent on Him and your life is in danger.”
This is important to think about. It may seem unlikely that Christians will literally be herded into camps, but think about a child like Domenic Johannson, who was seized from his parents in Sweden and may well remain separated from them until he is an adult. (Will Sweden allow him to be reunited with his parents then?) Children in the West can be taken from their parents for ideological reasons and placed into the care of foster parents and other state social agents who are deliberately trying to counteract the worldview with which they were raised. In this context, having Scripture memorized could be extremely important.

I would like to read Dittman's whole story. For now, I am just digesting the sobering fact that America has changed so drastically that she cannot tell it in many schools because of the aggressive anti-Christianity of those schools. And people wonder why parents wouldn't want to send their children to public schools. Sometimes, it's hard to know where to start to answer the question.

2 comments:

William Luse said...

Well, that was depressing. Makes one sick for one's country. They wanted her to speak because they were interested in her story of survival. But they weren't really interested.

Lydia McGrew said...

Maybe it's because I'm re-reading Michael O'Brien's dystopian future novels right now, but her comments really made me somber. She's lived long enough to see the trend and to see the change. We all know that things have changed for the worse in America as far as the treatment of religion, but she can speak to that very directly. The hatred of Christianity is very real, and the pretense of neutrality is very thin. (I wonder how many of these same public schools had Islamic awareness classes for "cultural education" with prayers to Allah on the board.)

If she thinks it plausible that Christians will suffer more severe persecution, that should be taken seriously.