Sasha Semenoff cradles a violin. Music not only became his adult livelihood. It sustained him during the dark days of Nazi captivity and forced labor; a couple of times, it may have literally saved his life. Photo by John Locher.

Last fall at age 81, Las Vegas violinist-conductor Sasha Semenoff finally quit the grind of working every night.

After decades of long-term gigs, most recently at a restaurant at The Venetian, the Latvian-born musician has decided to work only special events, such as Nevada Ballet Theatre's recent annual ball.

Music has played an essential role throughout the life of Semenoff -- born Abram Schapiro -- even during the dark days of the Holocaust, when he was wrenched from his family and sent to concentration and forced labor camps. Several times Nazis forced him to entertain.

The only son of a Jewish textile salesman and his wife, young Semenoff took to the piano at an early age. When he was 16, Nazis occupied his hometown, Riga, in July 1941. Within days, most of Riga's Jewish men, including Semenoff's father, were arrested and hauled off -- and killed, history later showed. Not long after, a highly placed Latvian Nazi seized the family's apartment and furnishings; Semenoff and his mother had to share a downstairs unit with several other Jewish families who lived in the building. But the official, Herbert Cukurs, regularly forced young Semenoff to come upstairs to the teen's former apartment to play the family's confiscated piano to entertain Cukurs' guests.

By November 1941 a Jewish ghetto was created on the poor side of Riga. Semenoff and his mother had to move there; she persuaded him that his chance of survival was greater if he went to the men's side, instead of staying with her. Several weeks later the women and children's side was liquidated. Semenoff never saw his mother again.

"Within four months, I lost my ... family," he recalls. "Mentally and physically, we were completely destroyed. There was no joy to have survived." His older sister had fled before the Nazis occupied Latvia, and he didn't know where she was.

From the ghetto Semenoff was assigned to work in a local factory that produced apparel for soldiers. Then the Nazis moved him to a concentration camp in Latvia called Lenta. In late 1943 they shipped him in a batch of prisoners to Stutthof, a forced labor camp near Gdansk, Poland.

Again, the young musician's talents helped him survive. When his group transferred from a large freighter to small boats that delivered them to Stutthof, a guard saw that Semenoff had hidden a battered mandolin in his clothing. The guard didn't punish the teen for having private belongings; instead he ordered him to play during the ride. The musician complied. "It was a horrible voyage," he wrote in his 1986 memoir.

In the port city of Gdansk -- also known by the German name Danzig -- Jewish work crews from Stutthof did hard labor in the shipyards. By the end of 1944, as Russia's forces approached from the east, the Nazis frequently shuffled the populations of work camps on the eastern front. "They kept moving us from camp to camp by foot. I got typhoid," Semenoff recalls. Rather than stay in the "death barracks" that housed inmates too sick to work, he forced himself to walk to each new camp.

Finally, in 1945, Semenoff's last camp was liberated by Russian soldiers. Following his lengthy recovery from disease and malnutrition in several hospitals, the Red Cross in Czechoslovakia gave the 20-year-old a donated violin, and he got a job leading a circus band.

"I ran away from the circus," he says, laughing. "We had to do everything -- clean the animals, put up the tent. I decided that's not for me." He learned his sister was alive but trapped behind the Iron Curtain. The two did not meet again until 1963, when his sister immigrated to Israel.

After sneaking across the border into Germany in early 1946, he made his way to the U.S.-controlled sector and started researching immigration options. He located an uncle in California, the ballet dancer Simon Semenoff, who agreed to sponsor his nephew into this country. It took him years to win a visa.

"I had to live in Germany, for four years amongst Germans, after all I've been through?" the younger Semenoff remembers thinking. "But I found out, not all Germans were Nazis, and not all Nazis were Germans." During that wait, he took his uncle's stage name, Semenoff, as his own stage name.

In the United States by the end of 1949, Sasha Semenoff worked first as a translator in New York. He then got on as a violinist with the Griff Williams big band out of Chicago, which traveled. In 1959 he "got a call from a friend playing at the D.I. (Desert Inn Hotel) in Las Vegas. He said, 'Can you get 10 violins and come out? You can play four weeks, with an option.'" The job lasted four years. Semenoff has lived here, and mostly worked here, ever since.

Talking about his Holocaust experience came slowly. "In the beginning I didn't talk about it ... except to my wife (Sylvia, who died in 2000). I didn't want to upset the kids." When their sons reached the teen years, Semenoff tried to share his story but found they weren't yet old enough to grasp the enormity of the events. From the 1980s on, Semenoff has spoken regularly to public groups about the Holocaust. The Shoah Foundation interviewed Semenoff for its extensive archive of survivor accounts.

"The only thing is that I realize more and more that the world did not learn a lesson. It's happening again," he says, citing a January knife attack in a Moscow synagogue. Hate targeted against groups "didn't start with Hitler and it didn't end with Hitler. ... There are other Hitlers around."