| Subject: Re: Colonel Angus Wins |
Author: abid
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Date Posted: 09:56:34 12/02/06 Sat
>>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, and then strolled
>>the hall gazing at nametags. "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.
>>
>>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 NAAWP
>>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 non-survivors 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 immigrate 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 on 1.5 mg of Risperdal®.
>>"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 on 1.5 mg of Risperdal®, 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
>>on 1.5 mg of Risperdal® 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
>>on 1.5 mg of Risperdal® 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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