Fernande Chenin's Auschwitz prisoner tattoo has faded over the years, but not her identity as a survivor. Photo by John Locher. Dr. Bruno Borenstein, whose mother survived the Holocaust, stands before a memorial wall at Temple Beth Sholom, in which cobblestones from the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, Poland, are imbedded. The wall is part of the temple's Warsaw Ghetto Remembrance Garden in honor of victims of a 1943 ghetto uprising. Jews who had been segregated into the ghetto fought German troops but were eventually quelled. Photo by John Locher.

It's almost 61 years post-liberation. Survivors of the Nazi Holocaust are nearing the end of their lives.

Many feel new urgency to spread the word on what happened to them during World War II, which ended in Europe on May 8, 1945. Others will take the details of their wartime experiences to the grave, unshared even with immediate family members.

Both extremes exist among Las Vegas survivors. Their offspring, too, are torn over whether to probe the family's painful Holocaust legacy. Two days before Yom Hashoah, the Review-Journal asks local families how they wrestle with the dilemma. Yom Hashoah is Hebrew for Holocaust Memorial Day, which this year is observed on Tuesday.

The intersection of the two generations -- survivor and grown child -- is a curious phenomenon that psychotherapists and neurobiologists have studied. Extreme stress and psychological trauma suffered by one generation can touch the next -- due both to prenatal hormone exposure and environmental conditioning in childhood -- suggest studies that have looked at the children of prisoners of war and Vietnam veterans, as well as of Holocaust survivors. For that reason, children of the latter sometimes are called second-generation Holocaust survivors.

Although the aging first generation is dwindling, Jewish leaders in Southern Nevada say their numbers here may in fact be growing, as a subset of the booming overall Jewish population. Clark County Jewish residents numbered about 50,000 to 60,000 about a decade ago, according to the Jewish Federation of Las Vegas, 3909 S. Maryland Parkway. Today 80,000 to 100,000 Jews make their homes here, the federation unofficially estimates.

It has no firm numbers how many of those survived the Holocaust. But elderly people who have never affiliated with a Las Vegas synagogue or Jewish organization still regularly walk in the door of the Jewish Family Service Agency, 4794 S. Eastern Ave., for help filing a Holocaust victim statement, in order to unlock reparations funds. People do so for varying reasons, says Danielle Norris, the agency case manager who helps them prepare their victim statements.

Even if survivors don't need the money -- and donate it to charity -- they seem to find the process a safe way to finally disclose their ordeal.

"This is a way they can tell their story without saying, 'I need to talk to a professional. I need counseling.' ... For many it's an acknowledgment (that) this loss happened. Somebody is taking responsibility" by awarding a monetary sum, explains Marilyn LaMascus, agency director of clinical services.

Emotions can run high during a session to take a statement. "Some of them haven't even told their spouses of 40 years what happened," Norris says. "I've had a lot of the wives cry. I've had a lot of husbands say repeatedly, 'I can't believe you didn't tell me.'"

Some survivors, Norris notes, end up summoning details they didn't even know they remembered. During one interview, a client suddenly recalled which lullaby his mother was singing to his 3-year-old brother while they waited for transport to a concentration camp. The mother and toddler did not survive.

And yet, a fair number of Norris' clients decline to take home a copy of their own statement, once they send it off, she adds. A spare set of the paperwork does stay at Norris' office.

Some survivors are activists

Stephen Nasser, now 75, waited more than 50 years to publish his account of surviving as a young Hungarian Jew in the Auschwitz death camp and several labor camps. Until one uncle died in 1996, Nasser didn't feel right disclosing he had watched a Nazi officer kill the uncle's wife and infant son upon arrival at Auschwitz in 1944, when she refused to part with her baby -- a fact Nasser had hidden all those years to spare the uncle, who was imprisoned elsewhere in 1944.

The book, "My Brother's Voice," came out in 2003. It's based on Nasser's wartime diary, which he lost but reconstructed in 1948. Since then, the author has worked relentlessly to get his story out. In 2004, Nasser and his wife drove by RV across the United States and Canada, making "cold calls" to 70 libraries, to get the book on public shelves.

Las Vegan Henry Schuster, 80, worked seven years to get his small German hometown to dedicate a monument in memory of the 32 Jews -- a third of the town's Jewish population -- who died in the Holocaust. His efforts culminated in 2004, when the town, Sterbfritz, finally erected several markers.

The Nassers and Schusters moved to Las Vegas for retirement. Schuster and his wife have a finger on the pulse of the Holocaust community in Southern Nevada. They launched a survivors group in 1995 that now has more than 300 members and meets regularly for social, educational and support reasons. Many participants volunteer as Holocaust speakers.

Why talk now?

It's not coincidental that some survivors are now starting to speak out. "Generally speaking, a task when people get older is to look back on their life. You might call it reminiscing. We always associate reminiscence with happy times, but really reminiscence can cover the whole waterfront," explains Paula Fern of Jewish Family Service of Los Angeles.

Late in life most people try to "see that their lives have made sense and been meaningful," notes Fern, who manages programs for Holocaust survivors. Her Los Angeles agency has offered such specialized programs for more than 20 years.

Given that some people deny or downplay the Holocaust, a life review is even more fraught for survivors, according to Fern, who spoke by telephone. "It serves a mental health purpose of making those experiences meaningful, because essentially they ... didn't make sense."

The Schusters say some Las Vegas survivors are reporting a return -- after years of no dreams -- of bone-chilling nightmares about the Holocaust years. LaMascus and Fern both think the recurrence is tied to aging.

"As people get older and have health decline, or friends and family pass away, those kinds of episodes of loss ... trigger memories of other losses, that may cause renewal or strengthening of nightmares," says Fern, who holds advanced degrees in social work and gerontology. But the dreams don't bear on the emotional fitness of survivors, she adds, emphatically. "Truthfully, the survivors who are alive today, 61 years after liberation, were tough, hard-working people. And still are."

Irony exists in cases where the first-generation survivors now speak freely to public audiences, but had difficulty talking to their own children.

"I know some second-generation survivors who, to this day, don't know what their parents went through because they (the parents) can't, still, talk about it." The speaker is Meyer Bodoff, chief executive officer of the Jewish Federation of Las Vegas, who is a second-generation survivor. His mother and two aunts fled their native Lithuania to get out of harm's way.

"You sense there are certain things you just can't bring up. There's all this emotion that could emerge," says Dr. Bruno Borenstein, 64, speaking of his childhood. His parents fled Austria in 1939, leaving behind their three living parents, who all died in the Holocaust. "To ask, 'Would I have left (the danger in Europe) without my parents?' is to judge my mother," he notes.

Borenstein pieced together what he knows of the family's Holocaust history by talking to other relatives, because his own parents never would talk. The doctor works in internal medicine for the Las Vegas branch of the Department of Veterans Affairs. He also helped found a local Second Generation Survivors Group that is an offshoot of the first-generation group the Schusters lead.

Mitch Gilbert's mother left Germany in 1938 with her parents. One of his aunts survived the Holocaust, but lost two children. "It wasn't discussed. Or if there were discussions between grandparents and that aunt, they were talking Yiddish, and I didn't understand," says Gilbert, 50, former executive director of the Jewish Family Service Agency here. He believes his elders chose Yiddish to shield the younger generation from the topic.

Talking is painful

Many families repeat the pattern of silence, in which each generation fails to engage the other about the Holocaust. Parents don't want to worry their children. Children don't want to revive pain in the parent. A "mutual conspiracy of protection" is what Fern calls the dynamic. "It's beautiful, but sad."

But the pattern of silence has exacted a price, according to Florabel Kinsler, a clinical social worker in Southern California who pioneered counseling programs for second-generation survivors in the 1970s.

Anxious, overprotective parents with a European outlook were raising American-born youngsters with little inkling of, or no useful response to, the depth of their parents' pain. It made for a volatile mix. The first generation was plunged "in what we did not know was going to be lifelong grieving" for their Holocaust losses, Kinsler says in a telephone interview.

Members of the first generation may have literally passed some of their anxiety to their offspring. "In the third trimester of pregnancy," Kinsler explains, "hormones pass the placental barrier. Hormones may include adrenal output from parental anxiety -- they were in a strange country, no money. We are only now learning what all this means." She cites studies that suggest children of traumatized parents can as a result have reduced immune systems as well as heightened stress reactions.

Many in the first generation also subtly conditioned their offspring to anxiety. By Jewish tradition, children often are named after deceased relatives. The burden to measure up is great for offspring who carry the names of Holocaust victims. And some survivors constantly second-guessed their children's decisions out of hyper-vigilance.

Gilbert is named after both an aunt and uncle who died by the Nazis. He describes his 77-year-old mother, the survivor: "I hope she lives to be 120 years old, but the proverbial glass is always half-empty for her. She lives in a world where she's always afraid." He said he and his older sister both suffer from anxiety disorders. He manages his with medications and therapy, and wonders whether it links to the family's Holocaust experience.

California filmmaker Sharon Blumenthal looked at this intergenerational dynamic in "The Phoenix Effect," a 2003 Holocaust documentary that had its only Las Vegas showing in February. It explores the strains within such families, as well as their successes, hence the title's allusion to rebirth. "Sometimes there's a tumultuous response" when audiences contain both generations, Blumenthal said by telephone.

Second Generation organizes

The Second Generation Survivors Group in Las Vegas started in 2004. It has about 35 participants, from 50 to 70 years old. It has not yet coalesced, Borenstein concedes, possibly because members had no clear shared purpose. This year he hopes it will gel as it takes on a practical project: collecting local oral histories about the Holocaust.

Volunteers now are training with the director of the oral history program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The group plans to capture for posterity the experiences of local people from both generations. "There's concern that it (the Holocaust) has already been consigned to 'another event in history.' That's part of the rush to preserve memory, to preserve artifacts," Borenstein explains.

Gilbert has another, broader strategy to strengthen Judaism, as first-generation Holocaust survivors who dodged Hitler now die at the hand of Father Time. Echoing Jewish theologian Emil Fackenheim, Gilbert begs Jews in North America "not to give Hitler a posthumous victory by assimilating" into the non-Jewish mainstream.

"We have a dual responsibility," Gilbert concludes. "We want to make sure the story of the Holocaust is repeated and shared. And second, we have a responsibility to sustain Jewish identity."