Warren G. Moses History Lecture : Anne Levy

Ms. Levy was born in Lodz, Poland as the oldest of three children. She was four years old when the Germans invaded Poland and her family went to Warsaw and spent two years in the Warsaw Ghetto. In January 1943, with the aid of a Polish Army officer, her father arranged for the family to be smuggled out of the ghetto to Warsaw, where they narrowly survived the rest of the war. Anne, her parents, and her younger sister Lila were among very few Jewish families that survived the Holocaust intact. They moved to New Orleans in 1949, where they permanently settled with the help of the National Council of Jewish Women.

 

Ms. Levy has an extensive legacy of activism, notably confronting David Duke, a Holocaust denier, who ran for political office on Louisiana in 1991. Her legacy is captured within Historian Lawrence N. Powell’s book titled “Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, The Holocaust, and David Duke’s Louisiana,” published in 2000. Powell quotes, “Anne Levy shows how one person can become the moral compass for a movement.”

 

In her conversation with Upper School students, Ms. Levy shared personal stories from her childhood, impressing upon students the importance of being kind to one another, respecting each other’s personal beliefs and backgrounds, and taking care of one another.

 

An integral part of the Series is the Moses Scholars Competition. The prompt for this year’s essay contest was purposely open-ended: What question would you ask Ms. Levy, a Holocaust survivor, and why? The winners, as chosen by members of the Newman History Department, were Lauren Klebba ’24 and Ava Weill ‘24.