Wearing a black cap and gown, Anne Skorecki Levy smiled broadly as she walked with Loyola University officials and professors to the music of Pomp and Circumstance, preparing to receive what she called “the most incredible gift of my life.”
At 87, Levy has experienced some of the best and worst of what life has to offer. She endured the Holocaust as a child in Poland, but felt a warm embrace of acceptance when her family arrived in New Orleans. Levy has spent decades educating young people around the city about the horrors her family endured.
Naomi Yavneh-Klos speaks during the mini-commencement to award Anne Levy her honorary degree at Loyola University in New Orleans, Friday, Aug. 12, 2022. (Photo by Sophia Germer, NOLA.com, The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate)
On Friday, Loyola awarded Levy an honorary doctorate during a small ceremony attended by her friends and family. Her citation read: “educator, humanitarian and truth-teller.”
“I’m having a hard time finding the right words to express what this honor means to me,” Levy said. “It has been my family’s survival that became my mission to teach people that hate, anti-Semitism and discrimination can destroy a civilization.”
A history revisited
“Anne’s story demonstrates persistence in the face of terror, and resilience in learning a new language and culture and making a new country her home,” Naomi Yavneh Klos, a Loyola professor who nominated Levy for the honor, said at the invocation ceremony. “But beyond persistence and resilience, Anne demonstrates courage, a commitment to standing up against hate, and a determination to be a woman for and with others. “
Born in Lodz, Poland in 1936, Levy was a toddler when the Germans seized control of her homeland. Her family was forced first into the Lodz Ghetto, then into the Warsaw Ghetto.
A book about Holocaust survivor Anne Levy and former Klan leader David Duke on a coffee table at the home in New Orleans on Tuesday, August 9, 2022. (Photo by Chris Granger | The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate)
In interviews, Levy recounted how her family was smuggled to the Aryan side of Poland, where they spent the remainder of the war hiding with a family using Catholic papers. Anne and her younger sister, Lila, hid in the darkness of a secret compartment in a vegetable bin, built by her father.
Levy said her family had intended to go to California, but their ship made a stop in New Orleans, where her father decided to settle the family.
She recalled a warm reception at the Jewish Community Center, where her family was met with open arms and white tablecloths. The community helped her family find an apartment and her father find work.
Anne Levy poses with historian and author Lawrence Powell who wrote Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, the Holocaust, and David Duke’s Louisiana, during the mini-commencement to award Anne Levy her honorary degree at Loyola University in New Orleans, Friday, Aug. 12, 2022. (Photo by Sophia Germer, NOLA.com, The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate)
“That’s what made me love this city,” she said. “No. 1, being free and No. 2, being accepted — that meant a lot being accepted as a family as Jews.”
Levy attended Eleanor McMain for two years when it was an all-girls school and finished at Alcée Fortier High School, now The Willow School. She and her husband, Stan, ran a successful antique store on Magazine Street, and raised three daughters.
Confronting David Duke
Later in life Levy began to speak publicly about the horrors she had witnessed as a young child.
“We lost a million and a half Jewish children, and to then get to live, I felt like I owed something,” Levy said. “Here we were, a nuclear family that survived, and I felt like that was my legacy.”
Levy visited classrooms, talking to children. She often joked with students that they were her psychiatrists.
“I poured my heart out of what I remembered and what was bad, you know, tried to teach the youngsters what can happen, you should accept everybody and not be discriminating.”
Something shifted for Levy, when David Duke, a neo-Nazi and grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, was elected to the state House of Representatives. In radio interviews, she said, hatred in his speech caused memories to resurface. In 1989, Levy spotted him at Holocaust exhibition at the State Capitol and confronted him.
“People that had never lost their freedom do not know what it means,” she said. “This was one man that I wouldn’t want for a leader that I wouldn’t want my children to have to listen to.”
Lawrence Powell, a Tulane University history professor who wrote a book about Levy’s family, called Levy a “moral symbol” for the anti-Duke movement, crediting her activism for the basis for Duke’s defeat in his U.S. Senate and gubernatorial runs.
“She’s an example of how an ordinary person can draw from their life experiences to accomplish extraordinary things,” he said. “She first got angry, then found courage.”
Levy considers the political divisiveness of today’s world cause for concern, and stressed the importance of telling history to younger generations.
“I’m scared to death, I really am afraid because I see similarities of people that get into government and forget who they were before,” she said. “I’ve lived here since 1949 and I’ve never seen America be this divided and people who want harm to us, that’s the way to do it.
