Before the Second World War, Anne Levy lived in Lodz, Poland, with her father Mark, mother Ruth, and younger sister Lila. The family name was Skorecki. Anne was four years old when the Germans invaded Poland. The family left Lodz and went to Warsaw, where they spent two years in the Warsaw Ghetto. Mark had "golden hands' (he could build anything) and became a "manager" in a Germany factory inside the ghetto. He built a secret compartment at the bottom of a "vegetable bin," and here the two girls were hidden from the Nazis and their collaborators. In January 1943, with the aid of a Polish Army officer, Mark arranged for the family to be smuggled out of the ghetto to the "Aryan side" of Warsaw. "Passing" as Christians, and with the help of Christians, the Skoreckis narrowly survived the rest of the war. Afterwards the family lived in the German town Tirschenreuth. In 1949, the family immigrated to New Orleans. Anne and her husband have four daughters.
In 1989, Anne repeatedly confronted David Duke, a Holocaust denier and former Klansman who was running for political office in Louisiana.
In the 1960s, Anne's mother Ruth dictated an account of the family's war-time experiences to a seminarian. With that account, and after extensive research in Poland and Israel, historian Lawrence N. Powell wrote a book titled, Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, The Holocaust, and David Duke's Louisiana, which was published in 2000.
This series was funded by the Rita and Harold Divine Foundation, the Siggy Boraks Family, and made possible by the generous contribution of video production services of WDSU-TV in New Orleans.