In discussing these two books together, one theme which seemed to emerge for us was the importance of a therapeutic space that can be experienced as a safe place in which conflicts may be registered and worked through. Ilany Kogan describes how it can be created in an analytic setting. In work with survivors of the Holocaust, the space is always connected with imagery of death: its most important quality is that it affirms life in the shadow of death. The continuous presence of what Robert Jay Lifton (1968) calls the ‘death imprints’ of the original ordeal correspondingly marks the lives of the second generation. Anne Karpf's book illustrates these themes in many ways. She is the unknowing carrier of her parents' experience - unknowing in the sense of not knowing the extent to which her inner constraint reflected the actual constraint of that