The University of North Carolina Press


Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, the Holocaust, and David Duke's Louisiana
by Lawrence N. Powell

$34.95 hardcover

   


From Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, the Holocaust, and David Duke's Louisiana, by Lawrence N. Powell. Copyright (c) 2000 by the University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1
The Political Gets Personal

During the Great Depression, Governor Huey Long hired some of the best stone carvers and sculptors around to chisel Louisiana imagery into the state capitol. Looming 450 feet above the Mississippi levee in Baton Rouge, the art deco skyscraper fairly drips with historical references. Massive statues of patriots and pioneers guard the portal to the Great Memorial Hall. Inside dozens of historical scenes fill bronze panels on the monumental doors leading to the House and Senate chambers. High up on the walls a frieze depicts Louisiana in war and peace, including a bas-relief of the Kingfish going over plans with the capitol's architects. The most popular visitor's site--a plaque located just off the main hall, behind the elevators--was never part of the original design. Bolted into the Levanto marble wall near three large bullet holes, it marks the spot where Huey and his assassin were gunned down in September 1935.

Traveling exhibits are routinely placed in the Great Memorial Hall, but the forty Holocaust posters ringing the rotunda in early June 1989 set the stage for an improbable clash over the politics of memory. David Duke, the Nazi sympathizer and former Klansman, had just been elected as a Republican to the lower house, and the staff of then governor Charles "Buddy" Roemer thought it was important to remind Louisianians that the destruction of European Jewry was not a matter for debate. For years Duke's mail-order business had been selling such tracts as The Myth of Six Million, along with an audio recording of himself discussing the "so-called holocaust." "This stuff's so sloppy . . . the whole thing comes down like a house of cards because it's just bullshit," Duke told an interviewer in 1985, and he went on to characterize the Third Reich's most notorious killing center as an Elysian experience: "You know, they had a soccer field at Auschwitz. They had an orchestra at Auschwitz, and the band was for the prisoner's enjoyment--pleasure."(1) As well known as Duke's views were to the state's Jewish community, most Louisianians were familiar only with his Klan past. About the neo-Nazi beliefs he had harbored since high school, they were completely in the dark.(2)

Nor were they overly familiar with the Third Reich and Hitler's war against the Jews. Fading fast from living memory, the Second World War's darkest chapter had received short shrift in the local schools. To be sure, Louisianians were hardly alone in their ignorance. According to a 1993 Gallup poll, over half of American high school students were unable to explain the meaning of the term "Holocaust."(3) But the historical amnesia was more extensive in the Bayou State, where, as recently as 1992, more than 90 percent of Louisianians lacking a high school diploma admitted knowing little or nothing about the Holocaust and Nazi Germany. If the state's high school dropout rates did not hover at Third World levels, the historical illiteracy might not be cause for concern. But the poorly educated bulk large in the Louisiana electorate, and it was the whites among them who later flocked to Duke during his candidacies for the U.S. Senate and the governorship.(4)

The Simon Wiesenthal Center's branch office in New York had contacted Roemer's staff shortly after Duke's election to offer the state its exhibit The Courage to Remember. Placed on easels at five-foot intervals around the hall, the posters traced the history of European anti-Semitism from the Reformation through the Holocaust. They featured two hundred pictures of gaunt concentration camp inmates, starving children, naked women, burning synagogues, and crematoriums. Quotations from Himmler and Hitler, together with anti-Jewish propaganda, were mocked by testimony from victims, survivors, and liberators. The two posters chronicling the Lodz and Warsaw Ghettos in Nazi-occupied Poland showed youngsters being torn away from their parents, and rag-covered women and children lying dead and dying on the cobblestone streets. "It was quite compelling," Roemer's assistant press secretary later remembered. The chiseled and kiln-fired history celebrated by Huey's architects jarred with the tragic memories evoked by the black-and-white imagery of the Wiesenthal exhibit. The posters were a horrific reminder of where racial extremism in modern society can ultimately lead.(5)

Because of Duke's sudden political notoriety, the opening ceremony in the rotunda on Tuesday, June 6, 1989, attracted unusual attention for a traveling exhibit. A Wiesenthal Center representative came down from New York. A forest of microphones towered in one corner of the hall where the governor was slated to talk. Among the approximately two hundred people in the audience were thirty members of the New Americans Social Club, who had come by chartered bus from New Orleans. The club had been incorporated by Holocaust survivors in 1961, just after American Nazi commander George Lincoln Rockwell sent his Virginia-based storm troopers on a "hate ride" from Virginia to picket the local premiere of the movie Exodus. Though originating in political controversy, the New Americans had long functioned informally like one of black New Orleans's social and pleasure clubs. The New Americans have jointly celebrated Hanukkah and the Fourth of July, regularly gathering for cards and small talk at one another's homes. For over four decades club members have served as surrogate aunts and uncles for American-born children severed by the Holocaust from generational roots. Weddings, and increasingly funerals, bring them together. Though the active membership has fallen by half, the New Americans still hold monthly meetings and an annual dinner. It was their idea to organize the annual Warsaw Ghetto uprising observance at the Jewish Community Center, one of the nation's longest-running ceremonies of remembrance. But until recently they have steered clear of politics. Duke's February 1989 election to the state legislature from the nearby white, middle-class community of Metairie reawakened dormant fears. Three decades earlier, Rockwell's "hate riders" had numbered less than a dozen. But Duke had managed to move just far enough away from the extremist fringe to persuade over eight thousand voters from Louisiana's wealthiest suburb to let him make law for the state. The New Americans needed little coaxing to take the ninety-minute bus ride north on the interstate for the Wiesenthal exhibit unveiling. David Duke's political breakthrough was serious business, not to mention an affront to memory.(6)

Anne Skorecki Levy was one of the New Americans who went to Baton Rouge for the ceremony. A child survivor of the Holocaust, she and her husband, Stan, run a large antique import business on the edge of New Orleans's fashionable Garden District. He is from Lowell, Massachusetts. She was born in the old textile center of Lodz, Poland. They met and married in the mid-1950s while he was serving in the Air Force in Mississippi. She is all of five feet tall in heels, with a radiant smile and a melodic, lilting voice that harmonizes Polish syntax with the distinctive inflections of Uptown New Orleans. In many ways she and Stan are paired opposites. He tends toward L.L. Bean casual. She dresses to the nines, even when running errands to the corner store. He is self-assured and outspoken, with a sardonic wit. Anne is bashful and diffident, a child of war-inflicted insecurities. When she traveled to Baton Rouge to attend the Wiesenthal opening, it was not to provoke an incident; like the other New Americans, she was there to bear witness.

But then the unexpected happened, prompted by a mysterious, almost unappeasable urge to exorcise nightmares by reliving them in the flesh. The impulse struck just before Governor Roemer rose to speak. The House had just recessed for lunch, and Representative Duke had made several passes through the hall, as if to tell the crowd he was not about to be intimidated. "For some reason," Anne remembers, "I turned to my right and there was David Duke looking at the exhibit posters. Something overcame me. This man was at the wrong place. This was not the place for him to be. What is his interest in seeing this when he is denying the whole thing?"

His posture upset her, too. Standing ramrod erect at parade rest, Duke was examining the posters as though he were conducting a selection at a railroad siding. "It's nothing anyone else would ever think about," she says. "But as a kid I remember the German soldiers walking around with their hands behind them as they looked over the people in line or on the trucks or on a train. It triggered something in me."

While the crowd focused on the governor, Anne walked quietly over to the freshman lawmaker. The physical contrast between survivor and Nazi apologist was as striking as their ideological differences. Duke's Aryan makeover included not only a new nose and chin but a health club physique for his six-foot-three frame. The petite, dark-haired grandmother had to reach high to touch his shoulder. "What are you doing here? Why are you looking at this?" she asked. Her voice was tremulous. "I thought you said it never happened." Duke ignored her. She tapped him again. "I touched his shoulder two or three times. And, finally, he kind of lost it and became vehement. He barked, `I didn't say it didn't happen. I said it was exaggerated.'"

Anne lost it too. She raised her voice. By this point her finger was in his face. Her whole frame shook. "What do you mean it's exaggerated? If you think it's exaggerated, I'll be glad to tell you about it!" Duke gazed into the middle distance, no doubt hoping she would go away.

The reporters covering the governor's speech sensed a photo opportunity in the making. The lights and whirring cameras swung from the far corner of the hall where Roemer's podium stood. A murmur swept through the audience. Now that the media was converging on the two antagonists, Duke grew intimidated. He moved away from Anne. She pursued him. He lengthened his stride, bounding past elevator doors paneled with bronze likenesses of thirty-six former governors. She could not move fast enough to keep pace.(7)

When reporters finally cornered Duke in the basement, he was careful to measure his words, conceding the reality of Nazi atrocities but challenging the accuracy of some accounts. For the most part, he repeated what he had told Anne Levy in the rotunda, that the horrors of the Holocaust had been "exaggerated." Duke was merely echoing the propaganda of self-styled "Holocaust revisionists," an international network of far-rightists whose aim is to rehabilitate National Socialism and refurbish anti-Semitic conspiracy myths. Since the late 1970s, deniers have been holding annual conferences at the California-based Institute for Historical Review (IHR).(8) "You ought to go to an IHR convention next year," Duke told an interviewer in 1985.(9) He himself had attended two of its meetings during the 1980s.

But, since his breakthrough into mainstream respectability, Duke was desperate to avoid even a hint of ideological extremism. Thus, standing in the basement, he abruptly cut off further interrogation about his views on World War II. "The Holocaust was not really an issue," he told capitol reporters. "It's not part of my political agenda." He had turned over a new leaf. He was now a born-again "Christian" conservative, whose opposition to "reverse discrimination" and welfare illegitimacy differed little from that of leading Republicans. Whatever he had said or written concerning Nazism and the Klan was musty history, a chapter of "youthful indiscretions" in a book he was determined should remain closed.(10)

But for Anne Levy, whose immigrant success story was self-confirmation of the American dream, Duke's views on the Holocaust were the issue. They hinted at darker subthemes in American history--an angry counterpoint of nativist intolerance that, like Europe's ethnic nationalisms, crests during social and economic crises. How could someone who glossed over genocide against ethnic minorities be entrusted to make laws for a melting pot society such as America? Anne was incredulous. In her view Duke's attempt to minimize what he had said and written about the Holocaust had less to do with politics than with democratic decency and civility. The charade defamed her experience as a survivor and a new American, and the anger welling up inside her was both personal and political, bordering on rage.

But Anne Levy's face-off with Duke awakened deep-seated terror as well. It was not simply that Duke's political success represented the survivor's worst nightmare: that it can happen again, "that the moment of horror will recur," to quote psychiatrist Judith L. Herman. Just as distressing was the way Anne's encounter with Louisiana's foremost neo-Nazi had summoned to the surface traumatic memories she had long ago sought to block from consciousness. Torn between terror and rage, she decided to let rage have its way.(11) Hers was a classic illustration of how political commitments are forged: first you get angry, then you find courage.

Shadow campaigns had been Duke's trademark ever since he began running for office in 1975. The charades became more sophisticated--and believable--after he left the Ku Klux Klan in 1980 to found his "white civil rights" organization, the National Association for the Advancement of White People (NAAWP). Thanks to cosmetic surgery, he had acquired the good looks of a television anchorman. His rhetoric began to sound more mainstream, partly because conservative Republicans had made racial codespeak the lingua franca of current politics.(12) As for his Klan past, he often brought it up himself, as if to let audiences know he was a politician who would actually deliver on his campaign threats. But Duke kept his extensive record of Nazi extremism, including a lifelong advocacy of ethnic cleansing and master-race eugenics, hidden in the shadows. Like his views on the Holocaust, they were not winning issues. "If they can call you a Nazi and make it stick," he cautioned a fellow racist in 1986, less than three years before his election to the legislature, "it's going to hurt the ability of people to open their minds to what you're saying."(13)

Duke's masquerade of respectability was more than personal opportunism. It reflected a strategic shift on the part of the wider neofascist movement. By the 1980s far-rightists in both Europe and America were running stealth campaigns similar to Duke's in order to take advantage of the conservative electoral trends of the Reagan-Thatcher era. In the United States the anti-Semitic Liberty Lobby, headed by Willis Carto, a founder of the IHR, even spearheaded the formation of an independent party called the Populists (modeled after Jean-Marie Le Pen's ultra-rightist National Front Party in France). For Carto, third-party politics represented an ongoing effort to channel white supremacist politics back into the conservative mainstream, from which he and other right-wing extremists had been excluded by William Buckley during the 1960s, when American conservatives began the coalition building that eventually placed Ronald Reagan in the White House. Duke had long been close to Carto's Liberty Lobby, so it was hardly surprising when the Populist Party in 1988 chose the Louisianian as its presidential standard-bearer. Six weeks following the general election, after Duke filed as a Republican for the legislative seat he eventually won, the Liberty Lobby gave him access to its mammoth mailing list. Right-wing money and cadres from around the country poured in to aid the Duke campaign.(14) "His race . . . takes on national significance," proclaimed a neo-Nazi writer who visited New Orleans during the campaign.(15)

Duke's legislative victory galvanized the far right because his house seat represented real power, not just another ephemeral primary victory of the kind neofascists had been scoring throughout the 1980s. It meant the movement now had a regular forum for reaching the media and shaping policy debates. That the beachhead had been established in Louisiana, where antielite insurgencies seemed as commonplace as Gulf-borne hurricanes, added to the excitement. Huey P. Long had set the standard during the New Deal, amassing dictatorial powers over Louisiana while building a mass following with real potential for toppling Franklin Roosevelt's presidency. Few right-wing observers expected Duke to replicate the Kingfish's feat, at least not any time soon, but there was a general anticipation that his election would spawn a school of Duke-like candidacies throughout the country, and they pointed to his campaign as a model for similar guerrilla forays against the two-party system's underbelly. Duke himself invited the flattery of imitation when he told a Populist Party gathering in Chicago a few weeks after his election that his Louisiana success "can be repeated in many, many other states in the United States."(16)

Partly because of his decisive defeat in the 1992 Louisiana governor's race, Duke's electoral appeal never crossed state lines. But he was certainly correct to sense that the Sportsman's Paradise offered room to grow. After all, Duke did not get elected in sparsely populated Klan country but in one of those vote-laden, white, middle-class suburbs where state and national elections are now won and lost. Bisected by the Mississippi River, at one time Jefferson Parish had nearly as many illegal casinos as it did dairy farms, until Sun Belt prosperity caused both banks to overflow with shopping malls and tract developments. Metairie (which is on the east bank, immediately abutting the city) paced the explosive suburbanization. The Grand Old Party (GOP) designated it a prime target in the campaign to shatter the Democratic Party's southern base. Campaigns based on race, low taxes, and traditional values forged an alliance between Metairie's bungalow Democrats and the country club Republicans residing in its oak-shaded mansions. In the 1970s Duke's district produced Louisiana's first Republican congressman and governor since Reconstruction. By that time it was already delivering lopsided majorities to GOP presidential candidates. Only George Wallace's 1968 white backlash insurgency, which captured both Jefferson Parish and the state, interrupted the steady march toward Republican dominance. But that had been more than two decades ago, and it was easy to forget how vulnerable this top-down coalition remained to race-coded appeals from the right.

Duke was a Wallace redux. When oil prices collapsed, depressing living standards and causing wholesale disillusionment with the political status quo, Duke deflected economic discontent onto New Orleans's desperately impoverished black underclass. He focused white voter anger over widening inequality on minority set-asides and affirmative action. Because Republicans had field-tested these themes so often in the past, no one should have been shocked when Metairie's white, middle-class majority suddenly deserted the GOP for Duke's backlash alliance against black have-nots. Nor was it surprising, during his U.S. Senate and gubernatorial races, when the reactionary populism fueling his appeal ignited other white suburbs and spread to Louisiana's economically distressed country parishes.(17)

When this blame-thy-neighbor protest broke out in nearby Metairie, however, it terrified Anne Levy. It was not because she felt in any imminent danger personally. Voter anger was seldom directed at Jews; African Americans were the target. As elsewhere in the United States, anti-Jewish feeling in Louisiana had ebbed markedly from the high tide of the 1930s, when such radio demagogues as Father Coughlin had railed openly against Jewish financiers. The real source of Anne's disquiet was the readiness of so many white voters to overlook Duke's anti-Semitism. His actual electoral strength was hard to estimate because white respondents gave pollsters misleading and evasive answers. Unscientific intuition often proved a better guide as to who among one's acquaintances might be swelling Duke's soon-to-be-legendary "hidden vote." His supporters, after all, were the kind of people Anne encountered several times a week. They made deliveries to the Levy storeroom or fixed the air conditioning. They checked out groceries at the supermarket. They sold insurance. Some, as members of the local gentility, purchased nineteenth-century mahogany armoires from Stan's store. "They would never say anything to your face, but for the first time it made me stop and think," Anne says. "I felt uncomfortable."

She also ran across Duke supporters in Metairie, where many of the metropolitan area's biggest malls are located. In fact, her first face-to-face encounter with Duke and the populist frenzy he was capable of unleashing occurred in neighboring Jefferson Parish four months before their publicized standoff in the state capitol. A harbinger of confrontations to come, it took place on the day of the legislative runoff. Anne's eight-year-old granddaughter Jesse was visiting from San Francisco, and on election Saturday she brought her to Metairie's sprawling Lakeside Shopping Center, approaching by way of a six-lane boulevard called Veterans.

Veterans is bisected by a grass-covered "neutral ground." Locals have been using demilitarized zone (DMZ) terminology for their median strips since the early 1800s, when hard-driving American entrepreneurs moved upstream from the Creole French Quarter to build a river port. The middle of Canal Street was the original "neutral ground" between the warring cultures, and the sobriquet has stuck. Covering a canal used to discharge torrential downpours, Veterans's midsection is almost as broad as the boulevard itself. That particular election Saturday, however, February 18, 1989, it was anything but neutral. The Duke camp had conquered one of its busiest intersections, taking possession by driving blue-and-white yard signs into the lawn. Pickup trucks with cab-mounted loudspeakers circled the perimeter. Duke was on hand to lead the campaign. Hundreds of friendly onlookers milled around the rally's edge, slowing traffic to a halt. Passing motorists honked approval, many flashing V-for-victory signs to the candidate's legions. The congestion was so bad, Duke did not have to wait for a red light before wading into the clotting traffic. That afternoon he was passing out carnival doubloons stamped with his likeness.

Like the hydraulics of a whirlpool, the traffic flow pulled Anne into the vortex. Before she knew what was happening, Duke had shoved an aluminum coin through the driver's window. It was right in her face. The roar of the crowd surrounded the car. "It happened so suddenly I was startled," Anne says. "I lost my cool and started cursing the man." Then she remembered that her granddaughter was beside her in the front seat. Shaken, she managed to navigate through the hoopla, apologizing to Jesse for the profanity. She wondered why Duke's presence affected her so viscerally. It was as if the memory of the Holocaust was being reexperienced anew, as if the rewind button on a tape recorder was being pressed down against her will. She felt isolated and powerless, which is the essential legacy of traumatic events and their engraved memories. Duke's growing popularity was unraveling a basic trust in a just world that Anne had been trying to rebuild for nearly fifty years.

From his residence across Lake Pontchartrain, near the epicenter of Louisiana Kluxery, the late Walker Percy understood the electoral dynamics that Anne had found so upsetting. The angry irrationality Duke aroused was not a localized aberration. "If I had anything to say to people outside the state," Percy told the New York Times's Wayne King shortly after the former Klansman's election to the Louisiana legislature, "I'd tell them, <'Don't make the mistake of thinking David Duke is a unique phenomenon confined to Louisiana rednecks and yahoos. He's not. He's not just appealing to the old Klan constituency, he's appealing to the white middle class. And don't think that he or somebody like him won't appeal to the white middle class of Chicago or Queens.'"(18)

Always central to that appeal was Duke's ability to convince would-be supporters of his born-again moderation. The alarming fact to Anne was how easily he was succeeding. Angry about crime, corruption, and the economy, many white Louisianians took his new look at face value. Even conventional politicians winked at his mainstream makeover, preferring to attack his draft record than expose his Nazism. Born of firsthand experience, Anne's foreboding was deep and unshakable. She did not have to consult polls to realize Duke was a sentinel symptom of a deeper malaise. The lessons of history validated her concerns. Hitler had risen to power on the indifference of ordinary Germans to the Fürer's political reputation. As a famous study of the Third Reich in a small town explains, local residents "were drawn to anti-Semitism because they were drawn to Nazism, not the other way around."(19) On balance, Duke's menace inhered in his movement's potential to recruit alienated voters with seductive programs of reform and renewal and then to focus anger on target groups--the classic scapegoating syndrome.(20)

"It's bad times," Anne said later, "and when bad times come, somebody has to get blamed. It's a vicious circle. It just repeats itself." Irreversible progress is an illusion.

Anne Levy recovered quickly from her brief election day encounter with Duke, but the effects of their run-in at the Wiesenthal exhibit tended to linger. She was still simmering about Duke's dismissive attitude toward the Holocaust a week following their confrontation in Baton Rouge, when she turned on the car radio while running errands in New Orleans and heard him participating in a "Symposium on Racism" with other local politicians, black and white, and the heads of the NAACP and the Urban League, before a live audience in a downtown hotel. The novelist Lucian Truscott, on assignment from Esquire to write a piece on Duke, was in the studio. Duke dominated the show. He bashed drug users in the projects. He blasted away at affirmative action and took savage aim at welfare. Black audience members in line at the mike were unable to get a word in edgewise. "A block of commercials was the only thing that could stop him," Truscott wrote.(21)

Anne was upset when she drove up to the furniture storeroom. Duke's participation in a race relations forum seemed as incongruous as his presence at the Wiesenthal exhibit. "Why is he participating in this? What has he done in his lifetime to bring people together to be able even to participate in a discussion like that?" she wondered. Her husband was standing on the sidewalk out front when she climbed from the car. "Stan, you should be listening to this radio, to what's going on and the discussion taking place," she told him.

"Oh, God, it must be David Duke," Stan said with a trace of annoyance because the subject upset Anne and distracted her around the office. But he was generally supportive of her efforts to confront Duke personally. "If you want to go, go," Stan told her.

"Do you think I should?"

"Damn right, go on."

She reached the studio as the program was winding down. To Duke, Anne looked vaguely familiar, like one of his growing legions of supporters in the white suburbs. He smiled when Anne entered the broadcast area, then pulled up a seat alongside her when the moderator broke for a commercial, saying he wanted to ask a few questions. No doubt he intended to recruit her for one of his phone banks. Anne grimaced, her eyes narrowing. She told Duke she was the woman who had challenged him the week before in Baton Rouge. "You don't remember me, do you, Mr. Duke?" The blood drained from his face, mottling his cheeks with white splotches. Anne said she would like to ask him a few questions too. "Well, that's fine," he answered, fumbling for a phone number in his pocket. "As soon as we finish, I'll be glad to talk to you." But Duke immediately left the room, and when he returned ten minutes later, practically hyperventilating, he was barely able to make one last flourishing speech into the radio mike about our brave boys in Saudi Arabia. Then he grabbed his briefcase and made for the door when she rose to approach him. "As na‹ve as I am, I thought we were going to sit down in the two chairs outside of the broadcast booth and talk one-on-one," Anne says.

Duke hurried from the building, with Anne pursuing him for the second time in a month. "Mr. Duke! Mr. Duke! How can you say the Holocaust was exaggerated?" They descended the curved staircase. "Wait a minute," she yelled, "if you wanted to talk to me, you better stand like a man and come talk to me. I'm not going to chase you." Her voice rose in pitch. Duke barely paused. "I just don't have any time. I can't," he answered.

Later, over a German beer at a Croatian restaurant in Jefferson Parish, Duke told Truscott that Anne Levy had been sent by the Zionist-Jewish conspiracy. "I was set up. . . . It's the Jews! You either know about them or you don't! They don't want me to succeed!"(22)

The neofascist journal Instauration decried the same malign conspiracy, likening Anne to a "political hit woman." "The Duke phenomenon has been giving some Jews a chance to play Hero for the Day," it editorialized, marshaling as evidence "Ann Levy, the feisty 4'11" veteran of the Warsaw Ghetto, whose shtick is to follow Goliath around crying, `Mr. Duke! Mr. Duke! Why will you not answer my questions?'"(23)

The discrimination that excludes Jews from men's clubs and Carnival krewes, as the city's Mardi Gras clubs are called, has served as a status ceiling in New Orleans high society since the turn of the century, when non-Jewish parvenus used anti-Semitism to gain access to the social register. Duke's paranoid delusions, however, had a different lineage, harking back to the conspiratorial anti-Semitism of the 1930s when Jews were depicted as a powerful, alien elite culpable for all modernity's woes.(24) As a troubled teenager coming of age during the desegregation crisis, Duke had absorbed fascistic fears of Jews. Now those visceral fears were becoming unmanageable, causing the facade of born-again moderation to crumble, and all because of one diminutive grandmother's passionate convictions--the sum of who she was and what she represented. For Anne Levy, Duke's panic-stricken reaction to demands that he explain his Holocaust views merely confirmed that the man's political change of heart was sheer pretense. It steeled her resolve to expose his hidden agenda. It became the focus of a special survivor's mission.

If Anne Levy's subsequent political activism had a single starting point, it was probably the 1983 American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors in Washington, D.C. Scheduled to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, the Washington conference was the largest meeting of Holocaust survivors in history, nearly doubling the attendance at the World Gathering in Jerusalem two years before. Nearly fifteen thousand survivors and their relatives crowded into the newly opened Capitol Convention Center. Anne says she first heard about Holocaust denial at the 1983 American Gathering.

The three-day reunion in Washington was an instructive lesson in how the search for roots can lead to a quest for meaning. "I'm looking for anyone--cousins, friends, anyone from my town," a Polish concentration camp survivor from Milwaukee told the New York Times. Delegates came wearing hand-painted signs advertising for loved ones. One woman wore a custom-printed sweatshirt that pleaded, in bold red letters: "Have you seen my sister, Hena Milich, from Lodz?" Survivors jammed the computer banks to register the names of family members and scroll electronic databases for European friends and relatives. They covered bulletin boards with notes about Polish towns and concentration camps, and clustered near endless rows of tables, each identified by European country, that organizers had cordoned off into a "survivor's village" to facilitate chance reunions.(25)

Anne Levy had also come to the American Gathering on "some remote chance," she wrote two weeks after the event, "someone might recognize my family name."(26) Like many survivors, she was just beginning to confront painful wartime memories. The previous year Dolek Skorecki, her father's first cousin, had shown up unexpectedly from Israel, where he had settled as a pioneer in the early 1930s. Dolek's family had run a typing school in Kielce, Poland, and Dolek, a short, wiry man who exudes natural warmth and loves to paint, was spending his retirement years traveling to Canada and the United States, reconstructing the Skorecki family tree. The branch that had been transplanted to New Orleans originated in Lodz. Anne's mother, Ruth Skorecka, had died ten years earlier of breast cancer, but her father, Mark, a semiretired cabinetmaker in New Orleans, was still living, as were her younger sister, Lila Millen, another New Orleans resident, and brother, Adam, who practices law in Atlanta. Adam had been born after the war in a displaced persons center in the American zone of occupied Germany. What is truly striking about the New Orleans branch of the Skoreckis is that they had lived through the Holocaust as a unit. Rarer still, they are one of the few Polish Jewish families that survived the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto intact, escaping only days before the Jewish combat organization fired on Nazi soldiers in mid-January 1943--the precursor to the famous uprising that, three months later, resulted in the ghetto's total destruction.

When Anne traveled to the Washington gathering, however, it was with her surrogate family, such people as Shep Zitler and Eva Galler, along with eight or ten other survivors from New Orleans, all members of the New Americans Social Club. "They've always been like the uncles and the aunts that I never knew," Anne says, "so I felt very comfortable." They provided her with a necessary support group. Like other attendees, Anne fed the names of her parents and siblings into the convention's computer terminals, then strolled the hall gazing at name tags. "I was looking to see if anybody would recognize the names, but they didn't."

In the convention center's cavernous hall, near the "survivor's village," conference organizers had set up a small stage with a microphone, where thousands of aging survivors stood patiently in line for the chance to announce, in trembling voice and fractured English, their names and hometowns and occasionally the camps where they had been imprisoned. Sometimes these public self-revelations led to tearful, on-the-spot reunions. But not very often. Anne joined the long line, only to discover on reaching the microphone that she knew too little about her Polish background to provide the audience with helpful clues. In the early 1960s her mother had dictated a memoir concerning the family's unique Holocaust experiences, but Ruth had barely discussed the past with her children, and Anne's father had completely clammed up after the war. It was not until he was well into his eighties that he started reminiscing. When Anne's turn to testify arrived, she felt like she was speaking into a void. "I went up to that podium three times, each time choked with tears, for it was then I realized I didn't know the names of either set of my grandparents or anyone else who perished in that beastly war." Pained by her inability to mourn relatives she barely knew, Anne came away with a heightened awareness of her spiritual kinship with other Holocaust survivors.(27)

She also returned home determined to bear personal witness against Nazi genocide. Partly by design, the moral imperative to remember practically dominated the convention's official proceedings. Conference organizers--many of whom, like Ben and Vladka Meed, were survivors themselves (Vladka was a courier for the Warsaw Ghetto Jewish Fighting Organization)--had been closely involved with the campaign to build the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on the Washington Mall, and they were therefore deeply concerned with teaching the lessons of the past.(28) President Ronald Reagan helped set the tone in his opening address to the American Gathering: "We who are old enough to remember must make certain those who take our place understand."(29) The thunderous applause greeting his remarks underscored how little nudging survivors needed at the time to shoulder history's didactic burdens. Advancing in age, several were beginning to talk about the war because they knew their passing would silence forever the compelling voices of firsthand testimony, and they feared the Holocaust's enormity might get lost in the bloodless abstractions of academic history. Moreover, unresolved guilt over having passed safely through fires that consumed relatives was likewise prodding survivors who experienced the Holocaust as young adults to begin confronting the past. Heretofore, the dominant mood had been to avoid dwelling on the war. Individual survival seemed largely a result of dumb luck. So what was the point of revisiting traumas that only increased remorse and made one afraid? As they faced death, though, they considered that perhaps their enduring had purpose after all. Somebody had to survive to recount the horror. To paraphrase Primo Levi, the philosopher of the death camps, their generation had been given the "awful privilege" to acquaint the world with radical evil.®MDSU¯30®MDNM¯

The public drama of those frustrated reunions in the "survivor's village" had made this much obvious: No one else was going to step out of the historical shadows to testify in their stead. Arbitrary fate had bequeathed the responsibility--and, for some, the guilt--to them alone. Shep Zitler, Anne's surrogate uncle from New Orleans, who was just starting to think about the meaning of his life, put it bluntly: "I survived in order to tell my story. Period."(31) Judging from the volume of personal survivor testimony beginning to flood the book market and oral history archives in the early 1980s, he was scarcely alone in asserting that his tragic family history had greater than purely genealogical meaning.

Besides impending mortality, one other catalyst impelled survivors to step forward with their stories: the increasing audacity of Holocaust deniers. Already propagandizing among high school teachers, a few years later "revisionists" would begin buying full-page ads in college newspapers to refute the Holocaust "myth." Denier activism had caused survivor children--the "second generation"--and other social action groups to organize countermovements. "As children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, we have a special obligation to make sure this doesn't happen again," the thirty-four-year-old chairman of an international network of survivor children told a Time magazine reporter covering the American Gathering.(32) In conjunction with survivor groups from Southern California, they were on hand to update the gathering on the "revisionist" activities of the Institute for Historical Review.

What survivors found most troubling, however, was the bold manner in which deniers covered their enterprise with a pseudoscholarly veneer, a tactical adjustment that was helping deniers acquire "the legitimacy of a point of view."(33) Even German conservatives anxious to refurbish a positive sense of German nationalism were starting to take their theories seriously, and they would soon be followed by rabid nationalists in Eastern Europe, who filled the void caused by Soviet empire's collapse with anti-Semitism and other forms of ethnic particularism. By the early 1980s the denial industry had devolved into subdisciplines. Some "revisionists" were specializing in the "fake photography problem." Others debunked Anne Frank's diary, because it was the main vehicle for introducing the young to the Holocaust. A French literary professor named Robert Faurisson--who was convicted in France of deliberate historical distortion--wrote extensively on the "mechanics of gassing" to spread the "good news" that the gas chambers at Auschwitz were a historical fiction. "Revisionism's" pseudoscientific research appeared in the IHR's quarterly, the Journal of Historical Review, under such titles as "Human Soap"; "Holocaust Pharmacology vs. Scientific Pharmacology"; and "The Problem of Crematoria Hours and Incineration Time," which used algebraic hieroglyphics to prove the Holocaust was a mathematical impossibility.34 Many survivors were startled to discover how adept deniers had become in the conventions of academic discourse. Those who sampled the literature confessed to feelings of sensory deprivation. They thought they were losing their identity both as survivors and as Jews.(35)

The "revisionist" writer producing the biggest sensation at the American Gathering was Arthur Butz, whose credentials as an electrical engineering professor at Northwestern University in Chicago gave the impression that "revisionism" had seized the academy's most commanding heights. Butz's The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, published in 1976 by the anti-Semitic Noontide Press, is practically the Bible of Holocaust denial literature. (Duke's ®MDUL¯NAAWP News®MDNM¯ advertised the title for years, calling it "the most important refutation of the Holocaust ever written.") Hoax summarizes many of the key arguments of Holocaust revisionism, beginning with the claim that the estimate of six million Jewish deaths is vastly exaggerated and running to the assertion that the gas chambers at Auschwitz were really delousing units. Throughout, Butz is relentlessly conspiratorial about the evidentiary record, dismissing it as the tainted product of postwar "show trials." As for the more than forty thousand linear feet of documents on German genocide captured by the United States alone, Butz says every edict, railroad manifest, and internal memorandum had been planted.(36)

As both a survivor and a member of the "second generation" (by virtue of her parents' survival), Anne Levy was poised to react strongly to the discovery that organized anti-Semites were defaming her experience. But more upsetting than anything was Professor Butz's potential impact on the young. "I was really stunned because here was an educated man who had influence in colleges writing a book saying that it never happened, that it was a hoax," she says. "I got really upset." So upset that she uncharacteristically wrote a letter to The New Orleans Times-Picayune shortly after returning home summarizing her new state of mind: "This story must be told and re-told, for in my own lifetime I have heard it said that the Holocaust didn't happen, that it was merely a fabrication of the Jews. Well, when you have witnessed death and starvation and see people comparing concentration camp numbers tattooed on their arms, how could anyone with any sense of compassion believe this never happened?" Moreover, despite its painfulness, she added, the tragic history needed to be continually recounted, "because this should never happen again to any people, be they Jews or anyone else on the face of this planet."(37)

Hers was the patriotism of the assimilated immigrant intensely devoted to America's universalistic creed, but the language of an editorial page scarcely hinted at the intense personal and moral feelings stirring within. Troubled memory was starting to surface unbidden, which is how trauma often asserts its claims on consciousness. Six years later, as her encounters with Duke assumed "the character of an immediate and violent impulse"--which is how Primo Levi depicts the survivor need to tell the "rest" of the story, even make nonsurvivors participate in it--the surge of recollection would drive Anne to embrace a mission of political witnessing.(38) The turn toward politics had all the hallmarks of self-therapy.

Like many survivors, however, Anne Levy's problem was finding the courage to tell her story. It took a long time to share it even with close acquaintances. Her friend Claire Tritt, who with her husband, Abner, publishes New Orleans's only Jewish weekly, never realized Anne was from Poland until the subject inadvertently came up during one of their long, daily morning walks to Uptown New Orleans's moss-curtained Audubon Park. Because of Anne's slight accent, Claire had always assumed her exercise partner had moved to New Orleans from Stan's home state of Massachusetts. "I'm not from New England, I'm from Lodz, Poland," Anne corrected her, and then proceeded to explain how her father, Mark, had been separated from the family early in the war, later found Ruth and the children near starvation in the Warsaw Ghetto, hid the two girls in various nooks and crannies during the wave of deportations that wiped out the world's second largest Jewish community, helped his family escape to the Aryan side, where they passed as non-Jews for the next two years, and finally carried them to the American zone in Germany after the war ended. The Skorecki family did not emigrate to America until 1949, when they sailed directly to New Orleans. "It took about an hour and a half for Anne to tell the story. Another walker was with us that morning, and we were all in tears by the end," Claire said. "People on the street thought something must be wrong with us."(39) Their conversation occurred two years or so after Anne returned from the 1983 American Gathering in Washington.

Sharing her story with friends was easy next to forcing it on David Duke. "It's a really difficult thing she's doing," noted Anne's thirty-three-year-old daughter, Robin, in 1992 of her mother's confrontations with the neo-Nazi. "It's not like she is so articulate and composed. She's barely able to get very direct remarks out. She's a totally emotional package." Although Anne long ago mastered English, her fluency often ebbed away when she was in a Duke-related situation. She would even physically shake. But she never wavered. After she let anger work for her, the inner turmoil spurred her on. "She just has to get at him and challenge his behavior toward her," Robin says. "It's a very personal thing."(40)

During the three years when Duke's political star was rising in Louisiana, Anne was practically consumed by his public presence. After their encounters in Baton Rouge and at the radio station, she never ceased trying to challenge him. She would drop what she was doing when he appeared on television. The volume had to be turned way up lest she miss a word. Constant busy signals at local radio stations were never a deterrent if Duke happened to be that evening's talk show guest. A couple of times she managed to get through to the switchboard. Always she asked the same insistent question; always Duke ended up soft-pedaling the Holocaust, saying it was not as bad as it was made out to be. Then he would quickly change the subject. Once he asked over the airwaves why she hated him. Before Anne could answer, he switched to the next caller. He refused to take her story seriously, and Anne was incensed. "It's one thing to have academic knowledge about the Holocaust; it's another to have that experience which propels you to wring his neck," Robin explains. "It sort of seems like my mom had no choice." Anne agrees: "I didn't mean to get involved, but something inside made me do it."(41)

If she had personal motives for confronting Duke, her behavior was freighted with political significance. It helped convince Duke's grassroots opponents in Louisiana that the best line of attack was to publicize his extremist beliefs concerning Hitler and the Holocaust. This moral strategy, surprisingly, initially met with widespread opposition. Hardened politicos argued that accusing Duke of harboring Nazi sympathies strained credulity. Better to stick with the road-tested themes of Louisiana mudslinging. Voters would find it easier to believe charges of tax evasion and womanizing. But there was something about Duke's visceral reactions to Anne's public reproaches that underscored the wisdom of attacking his Nazism. Any suggestion that his youthful extremism represented his real attitudes threatened popular support by exposing him as a faker.

Beth Rickey, a Tulane graduate student and Republican state central committeewoman then emerging as one of the former Klansman's most outspoken critics, learned of Anne's capitol confrontation with Duke immediately after it happened. A short while later, Rickey would become part of a small group of activists and academics who came together to form the Louisiana Coalition against Racism and Nazism. Anne's encounter with Duke happened while future founders of the coalition were struggling with basic strategy. The previous month Rickey and friends had purchased several Nazi books from Duke's Metairie bookstore, which doubled as both his home and his legislative office. One title was the notorious Turner Diaries, a racist fable of right-wing revolution that inspired the bank robbery and killing spree by a neo-Nazi group called the Order in the early 1980s (including the murder of talk show host Alan Berg) and possibly the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. Lance Hill, a fellow Tulane graduate student and a long-time civil rights activist, had suggested the book-buying idea. But now that Rickey's purchases confirmed suspicions that Duke was still trafficking in Nazi literature, it was unclear how and where the disclosure should be made public. Even anti-Duke lawmakers declined denouncing him on the floor of the legislature, and Rickey failed in her try to persuade the Republican state central committee to censure the new representative from Metairie. The state GOP had just embarked on a disastrous courtship with David Duke, its latest recruit. The setbacks were dispiriting. "I started dragging my feet," Rickey says, "and I was a little afraid of Duke as well. But then I thought if Anne Levy has got the guts to walk up to that man and ask him why he said the Holocaust never happened, I certainly could summon the courage to expose his Nazi book-selling operation." She also wanted to lend moral support. "I wanted to back her up. I wanted to say she has a point. She wasn't paranoid, she wasn't making it up. I thought how I would feel if I had that horrendous experience and no one stood up for me."(42)

The day after Anne confronted Duke in Baton Rouge, Rickey held a press conference in the Great Memorial Hall of the state capitol. Local television picked up the story first. Then the Associated Press sent it nationwide. It was the first major hit against Duke, and it inflicted lasting damage. "Because of the story, Duke was forever tagged with the label `Nazi book vendor,'" Beth says. "It hurt him, it dogged him, and Anne Levy is indirectly responsible in putting that label on him. She was the catalyst. I don't think the publicity would have had the same moral and political effect had the revelation of his book operation taken place at a different time and place."(43)

Anne Levy's relationship to the countermovement that ultimately defeated Duke was always reciprocal. She needed its moral encouragement. Public truth telling is a form of recovery, especially when combined with social action. Sharing traumatic experiences with others enables victims to reconstruct repressed memory, mourn loss, and master helplessness, which is trauma's essential insult. And, by facilitating reconnection to ordinary life, the public testimony helps survivors restore basic trust in a just world and overcome feelings of isolation. But the talking cure is predicated on the existence of a community willing to bear witness. "Recovery can take place only within the context of relationships," writes Judith Herman. "It cannot occur in isolation."(44)

For Anne Levy, the widening opposition to David Duke furnished the safe context in which to reconstruct her memories. Unexpectedly, she began receiving occasional notes and phone calls from friends applauding her courage. Then strangers started thanking her for her feistiness. Having been a private individual all her life, she was developing a public persona, and the new identity felt good. "My mother probably would have continued confronting Duke without the positive feedback," Robin believes, "but she would have been torn about whether she was doing the right thing. Little by little all these bits of support provided a framework she could feel secure in."(45)

It was as though the traumatic life events that had shaped Anne Levy were becoming the metaphor through which an emerging moral community was relearning the political lessons of history. And the more David Duke tried to run from a past he wanted to forget, the more Anne felt compelled to confront him with a past she could not forget--and would not let others forget either. Recounting her life story thus became a political mission, and the effect was redemptive.

"Life sometimes throws you strange curves," Anne said in 1992. But the bus trip with other New Orleans survivors to the Simon Wiesenthal exhibit at the Louisiana state capitol was surely the oddest, most unexpected culmination of life experiences. Seeing Duke standing at jack-booted parade rest before ghetto photographs that looked like snapshots in her mind caused disparate pieces of personal history suddenly to fuse together. A lost childhood in Poland, the postwar decompression in Germany and the United States, a recovery from fear for which no twelve-step method had yet been invented, the futile search for roots and the late-in-life realization of her special obligation to remember--these blurred images and poignant moments converged with lightning speed into transparent wholeness. Across the chasm of half a century, a political nightmare that had terrorized a continent and consumed millions seemed to be recurring in her new home, and now, as she waited for the commencement of a ceremony observing that tragedy, the political apotheosis of Holocaust denial in Louisiana stood less than fifty feet away. As Anne said later, something happened: "It was almost like I couldn't help myself."

After that first encounter memories started flooding back. She spoke about her childhood more often, increasingly to public audiences.

Telling her life story required reclaiming a European past that personal memory alone could not recover. It required establishing continuity with Old World family history.(46) Fortunately, there was the memoir that Anne's mother had dictated in 1963, the recollections of friends and other survivors, and a documentary trail in Germany and Poland.


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