By Megan Finnerty
Asst. Campus Editor

When she was 29 and living in Austria at the beginning of Hitler's Nazi occupation, one of the speakers at the 19th annual Holocaust Remembrance Conference avoided being arrested by Nazi police by pretending she was a prostitute.

Standing in a train station without identification or money, she used the only thing she had in her purse to help her, a tube of red lipstick. She quickly made herself up and flirted with the officers, who promptly told her that they "didn't have time for her kind."

That was just one of the many stories told by Anna Akeley, a 96-year-old survivor of the Holocaust and former physics professor at Purdue, during her informal speech to about 200 students, professors and community members in the Class of 1950 Lecture Hall.

She told the story of how she escaped Austria before much of the anti-Semitic violence began. Akeley had met and fallen in love with a physics professor at Purdue who wanted her to leave Europe to live with him in West Lafayette. The day her boat to New York was scheduled to leave an Italian port, Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator, closed the Atlantic to passenger traffic.

"The fact that I escaped the Holocaust was pure luck — nothing else," she said with an accent and a sigh.

She had to come to America by way of Russia, Siberia, Manchuria, China, Japan and the Pacific Ocean.

On the train through Siberia, vodka was free — which, according to Akeley, was a godsend because the food went bad halfway through the trip and she and other passengers used it to disinfect their dinners.

"I dumped a glass on my plate, let it sit for several minutes and soak in, and then I would eat it," she said with a smile. "I was continuously drunk."

Much of Akeley's hour-long speech was punctuated with moments of laughter and irony. Hers was not a tale of harrowing escapes and death but rather of washing up and sleeping at a brothel in Manchuria, giving away the coat into which she had sewn all her extra money and arriving in America only to be told she didn't weigh enough and might have tuberculosis.

After a four-month journey from Austria to America, Akeley arrived and eventually became the only professor in the physics department to be tenured without a doctoral degree.