Dorit Oliver-Wolff BEM - Against All Odds

Dorit Oliver-Wolff is a remarkable woman with a remarkable story to tell. This evening she came to our meeting at the Cooden Beach Hotel to tell us, in her own words, about her early life and experiences growing up as a Jewish girl in Nazi occupied Yugoslavia and Hungary. 

 As her story unfolded one couldn't fail to be impressed by her tenacious mother and Dorit's fortitude and intelligence that guided her through a perilous existence for six years of war and the aftermath of being stateless in a world that didn't care.

The full details of her life can be found in her book, "From a Yellow Star to Pop Star". Here you can read about her entertaining the King & Queen of Yugoslavia at the age of five, being spat upon by anti-Semitic hatred fuelled women, being captured and processed ready for concentration camp exile and escaping. How her mother protected her and kept her hidden in plain site while Jews were being rounded up wholesale in her home town of Bucharest. Throughout these trials in her early life Dorit developed a strategy of singing to raise her spirits and cocoon herself from the horrors and hunger she was experiencing.

Having been liberated by the Russian army and returned to Yugoslavia at the end of the war, she was weak, bald and unable to walk. Her new circumstances, although providing new opportunities, were also soured by increasing anti-semitism within the communist regime.  So after long delays and difficulties she and her mother managed to gain passage to Israel. 

Educated in a Catholic Convent School in Israel, her mother wanted Dorit to be able to speak French, however she wasn't to make Israel her forever home. The next chapter, again fraught with immense difficulties, found Dorit and her mother in Turkey, where Dorit's carrer in dancing and singing were to set her on her path to stardom.

Dorit tells her story not because she wants to remember but because she cannot forget. Her mission in public speaking is to "build bridges between different religions I am convinced that if people would listen to each other and compare their similarities rather than their differences, nations would learn to get along far better."

Graham Forster thanked Dorit for her fascinating story which had held us all in rapture and had made this Rotary meeting an evening we would not forget.