Here’s one lesson to be learned by Sharon Litwin

Sharon Litwin (photo by Jason Kruppa)

Editor’s Note: In honor and memory of Sharon Litwin, The Queen here at NolaVie, we will be publishing a piece from her every day for the next month. Sharon was an advocate and spokeswoman for arts, culture, people, and policies here in New Orleans. Her voice and sharp wit will be greatly missed.

At this contentious time in the world, current international conflicts make the future look grim for all of us. It wouldn’t be the first time in history. In this week’s Notes From New Orleans, Sharon Litwin reprises a conversation with one of our city’s most extraordinary “elders,” a man who went through the horrors of war and still believed he could make a difference to world peace.

Paul Fabry as a war correspondent in Ukraine, 1943.

In any city in America one can discover people of an age whose lives have encompassed the most difficult of eras and who have still been able to be visionaries. One is Paul Fabry, an elegant Hungarian-born 94-year-old gentleman of the old school who lives with his wife Betsy in a 170-year-old house on Bourbon Street. It’s the house where the idea of World Trade Centers was born.

Fabry, a former diplomat and journalist, was recruited to New Orleans in 1962 by the Board of Directors of International House. It was, at the time, the leading civic group dedicated to trade and port promotions for this city. Founded in 1943 with such active leaders as Hale and Lindy Boggs, it had a membership of 3,000 business people when Fabry came, all anxious to expand trade within Central and Latin American countries. The building, located at 221 Camp Street, was built in 1906 as the home of the Canal Louisiana Bank and Trust. In 1998 it was turned into a boutique hotel.

“They were believing for decades that Central America was the future of New Orleans,” Fabry says of the International House leadership. But he believed their vision was too limited; he pushed for extended trade throughout the entire world. It was his idea to create a series of centers on all continents that would globalize both business and tourism. It took almost a decade for Fabry’s concept of World Trade Centers organized by private business people to take hold.

By 1968 Fabry was holding meetings in his Vieux Carre home with representatives of other countries to form the first World Trade Center. Not long after, the International House organization changed its name to the New Orleans World Trade Center, the first organization of its kind in the world. Today there are almost 300 similar organizations in cities around the globe, none more important or more famous than the New York World Trade Center which was attacked by terrorists on September 11, 2001.

In the process of creating his new concept, Fabry traveled to more than 100 countries and organized trade missions for thousands of others in Louisiana and New York to go to all continents.

“In 1962 we had a telephone and that was a big technological advance to talk to somebody in Paris or Argentina,” Fabry recalls with a laugh. “And we couldn’t talk to people in China or people in Russia. At that time, it was a modern concept that we should work with all the countries regardless of their political system.”

Now 94 years old, and as up on current affairs as anyone a third his age, Fabry still maintains that doing business with all countries wherever possible is good for everyone, although he recognizes that the ways of communication are different. “Now you can sit in a little boat in the middle of the Hudson River and do it on the internet,” he says, sitting in front of his own computer in his second-floor office.

Fabry, who spends half the year in Aspen, Colorado and half in New Orleans can look back on a life that includes a doctorate degree in law from the University of Budapest; service as a reserve officer in the Hungarian army and as a war correspondent on the Eastern Front during World War II; and as a key member of an anti-Nazi resistance unit that saved thousands in his home country for which he has been honored with Hungary’s Presidential Gold Medal.

All of his experiences – but most particularly those during the Holocaust in World War II – have strengthened his belief in always being respectful of other people’s ideas even if they are the complete opposite of his own. He saw with his own eyes how that concept disappeared with the Nazis in Europe and, later, with the communist takeover of the Hungarian government.

So what is the lesson learned? “The key word is tolerance.” Fabry says. “What it teaches you is to accept other people’s opinions, way of life and other people’s taste. It gives you a philosophical basis, and that is my great lesson.”