Ines was born Agnes Cicchinelli in St Albans La Roche, France, on January 23, 1925, to Sicilian-heritage parents — her father Achilles Cicchinelli was Sicilian, and her mother Amelda Menouti carried what may also be an Italian or Sicilian name. She adopted “Ines Valda” as her adult French name and used both throughout her life — her American personal checks were signed “Ines V Jeannopoulos aka Agnes.”
Her childhood was shaped by early loss. Amelda died in her thirties of a heart ailment, presumably linked to earlier rheumatic fever; Achilles left the family at that point. Aline’s framing: “She was very secretive about her past…I believe her father left at that point. My impression was that she hated him.”
World War II — Resistance, Wiener Neustadt, Soviet liberation
She joined the French Resistance during the German occupation. She survived a firing squad and Nazi imprisonment — held at the Wiener Neustadt subcamp of Mauthausen, the women’s slave-labor facility tied to the Messerschmitt aircraft works in Austria. The camp was liberated by Soviet forces in April 1945. (The 2004 newspaper obituary mistakenly recorded American liberation; her actual release papers, retained by her daughter Aline, name Wiener Neustadt and confirm the Soviet liberation. The release papers list her under her legal birth name, Agnes Cicchinelli.)
After liberation she made her way west across the chaos of central Europe and joined the French Red Cross as a nurse, posted to Strasbourg, where she met John Lazare Jeannopoulos — a doctor in the US Army.
Tunisia 1948–51 — the Sousse field hospital
Ines had no pre-existing Tunisia connection of her own. She followed John to Tunisia at the end of WWII, where they married and ran a regional field hospital in Sousse together (1948–51). Their biological daughter Eftichia “Claudine” was born there around 1950, named after John’s mother Eftyhia Karamitrou. Ines and the infant Claudine sailed from Cannes to New York on the SS Constitution on November 30, 1951, where Claudine appears on the manifest as “Eftichia C. Jeannopoulos, age 1½.”
New York — Madame Jean
Raising her three daughters in NYC, she became a linguist and director at the Berlitz School of Languages, where she was known as “Madame Jean” until her retirement. She also went by “Agnes” — her birth-registration name, which John Lazare’s January 2004 obituary used when listing her as his surviving wife. She later lived in East Northport (Long Island) and Colorado.
She died April 7, 2004, ten weeks after her husband John. Interment at Calverton National Cemetery, New York.
Family
Three daughters: Eftichia “Claudine” Boyhan (biological, b. ~1950 Tunis, m. Patrick Boyhan), Myriam “Mya” Durso (adopted, m. Dominick Durso, d. 2002), and Aline Pepe (biological, m. Nick Pepe). Sixteen grandchildren and eleven great-grandchildren. Her grandchildren called her Meme.
Her 2004 obituary closes by naming brothers, sisters-in-law, a cousin, and an Aunt as surviving family members from France — leaving open a whole side of her family her American daughters did not grow up knowing. When Aline contacted a Cicchinelli cousin in Maryland at the time of Ines’s death and remarked she didn’t know much about her mother’s life before her sister Mya was born, the cousin replied: “You don’t know your Mother’s Story?”
