Fernande Chenin raised her son, Alan, and his sisters in Las Vegas but didn't share details of her Holocaust experience until the children were grown. Photo by John Locher.

Alan Chenin is 46, but he never heard his mother, Fernande Chenin, tell the full story of her time as a Jew in Nazi concentration and labor camps until four years ago, when she spoke to students at the Las Vegas grade school Alan's children were attending.

Several years ago Fernande also gave a lengthy video interview of her World War II experiences to the Survivors of Shoah Visual History Foundation. It took Alan more than three years to gather the resolve to watch his mother's videotape.

It's not that the younger Chenin is ignorant or dismissive of the Holocaust. He says his mother, 78, is his hero. It's that his parents never brought the subject up to him when he was young, from which he presumed that sharing details would be, for them, too painful. And by extension, too painful, as well, for Alan and his younger sisters, Lori and Sheryl.

'WE ALWAYS KNEW MY MOTHER HAD THE TATTOO'

Fernande was born on Bastille Day in France. Her husband, Simon Chenin, who died in 1995, was born in the United States. But Simon had numerous aunts, uncles and cousins in Europe who were killed in the Holocaust. So Alan is a second-generation survivor on his mother's side and a third-generation survivor on his dad's.

"We always knew my mother had the tattoo," Alan says of the A16773 inked into his mom's inner left arm near the elbow. (The A stands for Auschwitz). "She just said she got it in the war. It (the children's knowledge) was still nice and general."

It wasn't until his history class at Chaparral High watched a documentary movie about World War II that Alan learned it had entailed the systematic killing of Europe's Jews and that the genocide was sponsored by Germany's Nazi government. "I still really never heard her story. I still never really asked her."

In adulthood after he became a parent himself, Alan finally made of point of listening to Fernande's story.

Born in Paris in 1927, she was the youngest of the seven children of a Jewish leather-goods merchant and his wife. Fernande's mother died in a train accident when the daughter was 6. Her father already was ill from stomach cancer, so after his wife died, he put the two youngest children in a Jewish orphanage. He died when she was 9.

Fernande grew up in social institutions until July 1944, when French Nazi collaborators came and emptied the home where she was living. All the Jewish staff and children -- Fernande had just turned 17 -- were transferred to a suburb of Paris, where they boarded a cattle car bound for Auschwitz. Many Holocaust survivors recall the discomfort and stench on the trains, which provided no seats, lavatories or rest breaks. But Fernande also remembers the choir of her orphanage singing on the train, led in patriotic tunes by a non-Jewish member of the French resistance who had been captured and was being transported with them.

After Fernande survived the selection process at Auschwitz, she did forced labor at camps in Poland near the Czech border. "At first we had to make snow chains to go around the (tires of) trucks or the tanks going to Russia. We had big pliers, long pliers to put (the chains) together," she explains to a visitor in a sitting room at the retirement community in southeast Las Vegas where she now lives. After her camp ran out of steel for chains, inmates had to level a field to create an airplane runway.

By then it was 1945. French prisoners of war held at the same camp whispered word that the U.S. president, Franklin Roosevelt, had died in April. The news deflated Fernande. "I started crying. I say, 'We'll never be liberated.' Because to me President Roosevelt was my hero. He was going to be my liberator." Saddened, she deliberately slowed her shoveling of sod as they worked one day on the runway project. Twice a prison guard yelled, then hit her. "I didn't care. He very well could have shot me," she says.

After her camp was liberated by Russian soldiers, Fernande returned to Paris, where she worked several years until a sister who had married a U.S. soldier and was living in the States invited her to immigrate, too. She first lived in Washington, then moved to Cleveland, Ohio, in the mid-1950s, where she met and married Simon Chenin. The couple relocated to Las Vegas in 1963. Fernande worked for many years here as a school secretary while her husband was a barber.

"I don't really remember why I didn't talk before. I didn't think it was such a big deal," is how Fernande downplays her reluctance to discuss events when her children were young. Alan, on the other hand, has childhood memories of his parents and relatives ending up in tears on occasion when they looked at old photos that included family members who had perished under Hitler.

Knowing that his parents' extended families were decimated by the Holocaust always has made Alan feel his personal problems are trivial by comparison. He suffered bullying in school; then had a debilitating accident as an adult that required spinal repair surgery. He had to give up his barber occupation as a result of chronic pain but lost a personal-injury lawsuit he filed after the accident. Believing that some jurors were anti-Semitic, he appealed but did not win a retrial. But he avoided unloading his woes on his mom.

"What I went through is nothing compared to what my mother went through," Alan confides. "My parents taught me there are good Jews, there are bad Jews. There are good people and bad people in every race."