Henry Schuster, who lost his mother and a sister in the Holocaust, led a successful campaign in his German hometown to honor its Jewish residents who died in that era. Photo by John Locher.

For decades Las Vegan Henry Schuster, 80, never saw himself as a Holocaust survivor.

Never mind that his mother and one sister had died at the hands of Nazis. Or that his mother put him in a Jewish orphanage in a large German city in 1936, after his father's death, to avoid the wrath of an anti-Semitic teacher in their small German village of Sterbfritz. Or that the German orphanage sent its children in 1939 to France, to keep them out of harm's way -- and then moved them out of Paris, before the city fell to Germans in 1940, to a safer part of France.

If anything, Schuster saw himself more as liberator than survivor.

In 1941 at age 15, Schuster had arrived in the United States through a relocation program for refugee children who were in France. He went to live with distant relatives in Louisiana; their branch of the family had immigrated to the States several generations earlier. For several years, he heard nothing from his mother or two sisters.

After graduating high school, he joined the U.S. military in 1944 and during training, finally received word that one sister had been liberated at Bergen-Belsen, a German concentration camp. But his mother and other sister had died. The Army sent him to Germany in 1945 to help with postwar stabilization. First he stopped in France for a joyful but brief reunion with his sister.

It was the Shoah Foundation that finally helped Schuster decide he deserved to apply the title of survivor to himself, too. Short for Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation -- Shoah is Hebrew for calamity -- the nonprofit group has preserved the Holocaust experiences of almost 52,000 survivors around the world through videotaped interviews.

The group, founded by filmmaker Steven Spielberg, defines Holocaust survivors broadly. The term goes beyond survivors of concentration and labor camps to include people who were targeted for persecution by law or policy, as well as people -- such as Schuster -- who fled to avoid persecution.

"I am what is considered a hidden child," Schuster says. He is sitting at the dining table of his home in northwest Las Vegas. He and his wife, Anita, have lived here since 1993, after Henry retired from a fine-woodwork business he had built in Los Angeles.

Processing the family's Holocaust experience has been a lifelong endeavor for Henry. It took his sister, Betty, for example, 45 years to muster the strength to tell Henry precisely how their mother and sister had perished.

"I did not want to ask her. I did not want to put her through the agony of telling that story," Henry recalls. But eventually he learned that after transport to a camp in Estonia in 1942, his mother and 20-year-old sister Margot -- who wore glasses and limped from a badly set broken leg -- were "selected" for death. But their gas chamber was not the usual sort, he also learned. "Buses came without windows, and the exhaust pipe was fed (back) into the bus. It was a moving gas chamber."

In 1995 Henry and Anita launched the Holocaust Survivors Group of Southern Nevada with an attendance of 35. Today the group has more than 300 members. It holds social events, sends out educational speakers and helps members with a range of needs. It brought in a German lawyer to help members qualify for Holocaust restitution funds.

In 1997, Schuster and his wife were inspired by a visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Israel. "On the way home I said, 'My god, we have to honor these people -- my mother and sister and rest of the people from the town,' " Henry says. Before World War II, his hometown of Sterbfritz had 1,300 residents; 100 were Jewish, records show. By 1939, it had zero Jews. No marker existed to record the presence, or demise, of the 100.

So the Schusters approached the mayor and a Christian minister of Sterbfritz, which today has about 3,000 residents. "It's a wonderful idea but we don't have the names," is how Anita describes the leaders' lukewarm response. But the Schusters didn't take no. "We said, 'We'll give you the names,'" Anita recalls.

So Henry and Anita took on the grim task of researching the outcomes of the town's former Jews, using extensive records from Yad Vashem and elsewhere. In time the couple established that at least 32 of the 100 had died in the Holocaust.

It took several more years of negotiations, but in spring 2004 Sterbfritz erected three monuments to its lost Jews. Two are plaques that make general statements of tribute. But the Schusters insisted that the third, inside the town's Jewish cemetery, list all 32 names. "If they had died in that town, that's where they would have been buried," Henry explains.

Henry and Anita went to Sterbfritz to attend the three monument dedications, with some of their children and grandchildren present. They also attend a lot of funerals these days. "When a (Las Vegas) survivor dies, I go to every funeral," Henry says. "Not so much for the survivor, but the survivor's family. To let them know, someone cared."