Writing a Wrong
by Nick Marinello

Like so many little girls of her time, she betrays a mother's infatuation with celebrity. Even here, in prewar Poland, a half-world from Hollywood, her hair is faithfully combed and pinned into precious spirals of Shirley Temple curls.

The child's smile is just as sweet. Dimpled sweet. Innocent as spring.

Four-year-old Anne Skorecki looks out of this worn and weary photograph into your own eyes, and--if you know her story--your heart breaks. You wish that things would not go as badly as they will for this little girl and her younger sister, who stands like a pouting doll at her side. If every picture tells a story, then this unadorned image of goodness begins a tale of incalculable evil. It's an intimate account of perseverance scratched into an epic tale of despair, a story of the past that begins and ends in the present.

A Different Kind of Book

"It began serendipitously," are the words Tulane history professor Larry Powell first finds to describe the process of telling this story. Soon it will be routine for him to talk to interviewers, but now, in the early weeks of February, with a bound version of Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, The Holocaust and David Duke's Louisiana still in production, Powell must search for the right words.

Initially, "serendipity," that guiding force of fairy tales, seems incongruous with any story about the Holocaust, but survivors will tell you that it was often these unforeseen, charmed bits of happenstance--being at the right place at the right time--that could make the difference between life and death. Powell knows. He's talked to many.

So it is fitting that it was an intrusion of providence that brought Holocaust survivor Anne Skorecki Levy and Powell together. Although it is set largely against the grand and sinister tableau of the Holocaust, Troubled Memory (University of North Carolina Press) is ultimately Levy's story--of how she and her family escaped the grim tally of Hitler's Final Solution and how the childhood memories of that experience informed her anti-bigotry activism a half-century later. Yet had it not been for a particular turn of events, Powell just as easily could have told another story. In fact, he was supposed to.

"It started out as a different kind of book than it eventually became," admits Powell, a Tulane professor of history and scholar of the American Reconstruction and 19th-century civil rights.

It was back in 1992 when a "big-time agent" asked Powell to write a book on the "Stop Duke" movement of the previous year. Shaped by his 1960s liberal arts education, he always had embraced the historical study of American civil rights with more than aloof academic interest. When former Ku Klux Klan leader and Nazi sympathizer David Duke announced his 1990 candidacy for the U.S. Senate seat then held by J. Bennett Johnston, Powell helped organize the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism, a multiracial, multi-ethnic group bent on preventing Duke, then a state representative, from reaching Louisiana's highest office.

According to Powell, Duke's political success was tied to his ability to "perpetrate the fraud" that he was a mainstream, born-again conservative. No less than the New York Times credits the Louisiana Coalition as being the prime agent in shaping voters' perceptions that the new Duke still harbored the hostile racial and ethnic ideologies of the old Duke. "We took truth as our candidate," says Powell.

The book envisioned by the agent would tell the compelling tale of how a grass-roots coalition toppled Duke's political ambitions.

What most intrigued Powell was the sense of social duty that drove so many to join the "Stop Duke" movement. "People dropped everything they were doing," he says. "It was an action that sprung from a morally grounded sense of memory. People had a sense that we had been there, we had done that, we know where Nazism leads, and we were offended."

One Thing Led to Another

As he stitched together an outline for the book, Powell tracked down and talked to individuals who played a part in the coalition. It was inevitable that he would contact Anne Levy.

Levy had become something of a reluctant celebrity within the movement following her well-publicized confrontation with Duke in the main hall of the state capitol. It was June 1989, and Levy was among a group of Holocaust survivors in attendance during the opening ceremony of a Simon Wiesenthal Center exhibition of images and artifacts from the Holocaust. Duke, who recently had been elected to the state legislature as a Republican, made an appearance at the exhibit, a gesture rife with wicked irony considering his own long record of dismissing the "so-called Holocaust" as an overstated distortion of Nazi wartime atrocities.

That irony did not go unnoticed.

"I don't know what happened to me," recalls Levy, who at first was startled to see Duke. "I was just going to be very quiet and in my quiet way talk to this man."

Tapping Duke on the shoulder, Levy calmly demanded to know what Duke was doing at this event. "He was an educated man," says Levy. "He went to college. Didn't he really know about the Holocaust?"

According to Levy, Duke first attempted to ignore her, but as she persisted he "kind of snapped," shouting that he had never said the Holocaust hadn't happened, but only that it had been greatly exaggerated.

His response was like a slap in the face. "One thing led to another," she recalls. At 6-foot-3-inches, Duke stands about a foot taller than Levy, yet she managed to get in his face, wagging a finger as she prepared to give him a biting lesson in history he wouldn't soon forget.

Reporters on hand to cover the ceremony converged on the two, and the media-savvy Duke, recognizing bad publicity when it was headed his way, fled the hall. Despite Duke's quick exit, the incident was widely reported in the media.

It was, Levy recalls, a turning point in her life. After 40 years of following her parents' example of avoiding their shared memories of the Holocaust, Levy would gradually gain a kind of reconciliation with the past that allowed her to regularly speak out on issues of anti-Semitism and racism.

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