Entertainment

Project runaway

Petra Nemcova returned to Thailand (above) after surviving the tsunami.

Petra Nemcova (above, interviewed by Diane Sawyer) returned to Thailand after surviving the tsunami.

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Supermodel Petra Nemcova came close to opting out of “Dancing With the Stars” to aid victims of the disaster in Japan, sources close to the supermodel say.

With the new season premiere just days away, Nemcova — who barely survived a deadly 2004 tsunami — has been finding it hard to focus on her two-step, the sources say.

“It’s very hard to look . . . at those videos,” she told “Access Hollywood” on Friday.

“There’s the famous saying ‘six degrees of separation,’ but if a natural disaster happens, there’s no degree of separation. We are all connected.”

Her pelvis shattered, Nemcova spent eight hours clinging to a palm tree when deadly waves ravaged a Thai resort where she was vacationing with her fiancé, Simon Atlee, who was swept away by the current.

After months of healing and learning how to walk again, she went back to Thailand to help — instead of going back to work in the fashion business.

Within a year, she founded The Happy Hearts Foundation to aid children in the wake of natural disasters.

The foundation is geared to provide help during the long and unfunded period between when the emergency workers go home and the rebuilding process begins.

“It’s usually when the cameras leave that the support leaves as well,” she told a reporter last week. “Sometimes a whole generation skips their education. And, in areas where it’s so poor already, they go even more down the spiral, and extreme poverty is there for so many more years.

“Right now, we are working in nine countries,” she told The Post. “We have rebuilt 47 schools. I don’t see my life doing anything else.

“For about a year and a half — in 2009 and 2010 — I stopped working in the fashion world because I wanted to get more of an education to be a better leader for the foundation,” she says.

“So, I went to England and was studying at Cambridge. Just last January, I started to go back to work in the fashion industry.”

Nemcova — who recently became engaged to British actor Jamie Belmer and is planning a summer 2012 wedding — was the only cast member not in LA when the “Dancing” cast was revealed on live TV last month.

She had a previous engagement — a speech to give at the UN.

She is not apologetic about working in the fashion business at the same time she is running a charitable foundation.

It is precisely because the business is about glamour and looks that people in fashion seek out deeper connections to the world around them, she has said.

“Anything I do in my life — any project I get involved with — has to have a meaning and a purpose,” she says.

“This is really ‘Dancing With A Purpose’ for me. And the purpose is to be able to shine more of a light on the lives of children who are forgotten.”

Nemcova was talked out of dropping out of the competition for that reason, the sources said — to get the word out to a weekly audience of 18 million viewers.