Author:
Viva David Longinus
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Date Posted: 05:01:43 06/18/06 Sun
>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.
>
>
> -
rel=nofollow target=_blank >title="Atypical antipsychotic"
>href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atypical_antipsychot
>ic">Atypical antipsychotics:
>lastCheckbox="null"> -
rel=nofollow target=_blank >title="Clozapine"
>href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clozapine">Clozapine
> (Clozaril?) - Requires weekly to biweekly
rel=nofollow target=_blank >title="Complete blood count"
>href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_blood_count
>">CBC (FBC) due to risk of
rel=nofollow target=_blank >title="Agranulocytosis"
>href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agranulocytosis">agr
>anulocytosis (a severe decrease of
>href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_blood_cells">w
>hite blood cells). -
>style="font-variant: small-caps">
>size="1">
>href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olanzapine">Olanzapi
>ne (Zyprexa?) - Used to treate psychotic disorders
>including acute manic episodes and maintenance of
>bipolar disorder. Dosing 2.5 mg to 20 mg per day.
>Comes in a form that quickly dissovles in the mouth
>(Zyprexa Zydis). May cause appetite increase, weight
>gain and altered glucose metabolism leading to an
>increased risk of diabetes mellitus.
>-
>color="#FFFFFF" size="1">
>href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risperidone">Risperi
>done (Risperdal?) - Dosing 0.25 to 6 mg per day
>and is titrated upward; divided dosing is recommended
>until initial titration is completed at which time the
>drug can be administered once daily. Available in
>long-acting form (Risperdal Consta that is
>administered every 2 weeks; usual dose is 25 mg).
>Comes in a form that quickly dissovles in the mouth
>(Risperdal M-Tab) -
>style="font-variant: small-caps">
>size="1">
>href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quetiapine">Quetiapi
>ne (Seroquel?) - Used primarily to treat bipolar
>disorder and schizophrenia, and "off label"
>to treat chronic
>href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insomnia">insomnia
>a> and
>href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restless_legs_syndro
>me">restless legs syndrome; it is a powerful
>sedative (if it's used to treat sleep disorders and is
>and not effective at 200 mg, it is not going to be
>effective in this regard). Dosing starts at 25 mg and
>continues up to 800 mg maximum per day, depending on
>the severity of the symptom(s) being treated. Users
>typically take smaller doses during the day for the
>neuroleptic properties and larger dose at bedtime for
>the sedative effects. -
>style="font-variant: small-caps">
>size="1">
>href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ziprasidone">Ziprasi
>done (Geodon?) - Now (2006) approved to treat
>bipolar disorder. Dosing 20 mg twice daily initially
>up to 80 mg twice daily. Prolonged
>href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QT_interval">QT
>interval a concern; watch closely with patients
>who have heart disease; when used with other drugs
>that prolong QT interval potentially
>life-threatening.
> -
>size="1" color="#FFFFFF">Dopamine
>href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_agonist">par
>tial agonists:
>lastCheckbox="null"> -
rel=nofollow target=_blank >title="Aripiprazole"
>href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aripiprazole">Aripip
>razole (Abilify?) - Among the newest (2006)
>atypical antipsychotics; dosing 5 mg up to maximum of
>30 mg has been used. Mechanism of action is thought to
>reduce susceptibility to metabolic symptoms seen in
>some other atypical antipsychotics.
> -
>size="1" color="#FFFFFF">Under clinical devellopment -
>Bifeprunox; norclozapine (ACP-104).
>
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