Anne Skorecki Levy, b. 1935

With her family in 1943, young Anne Skorecki escaped the Warsaw Ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland and hid with a Catholic family until the end of WW II. She and her family arrived in New Orleans in 1949, where they permanently settled with the help of the NCJW Port and Dock Program. As adults, Levy and her sister, Lila Millan, began visiting schools to tell their story.

Levy used her own experiences to confront David Duke in his run for the US Senate against J. Bennett Johnston in 1990, and again when Duke ran for governor against Edwin Edwards in 1991. These confrontations inspired the political strategy of the Stop Duke Movement, which was to expose his Nazi and white supremacist leanings in Louisiana. Biographer Lawrence Powell notes, “Anne Levy shows how one person can become the moral compass for a movement.” For more information go to the Southern Institute for Education and Research. See also Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, the Holocaust and David Duke’s Louisiana.

Levy continues her fight against racism and bigotry as an educator for the World War II Museum, and for the Southern Institute for Education and Research.

Anne Skorecki Levy (forefront, facing right) and others in a teachers’ workshop, ca. 2010. Courtesy of Plater Robinson, Southern Institute for Education and Research.