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| Subject: David Duke's Medication Part II | |
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Author: Saint Morris |
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Date Posted: 05:13:52 06/18/06 Sun In reply to: Saint Morris 's message, "David Duke's Medication Part I" on 05:12:49 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.
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