Countertransference turmoil came to a head in a single session of an extended psychoanalysis of a patient descended from German Nazis by an analyst descended from German Jews. The patient's narrative had always evoked associations with the analyst's personal history, but the analyst's suggestion that the patient express a few associations in the German of his childhood—which turned out to be her own forgotten cradle language—opened a window onto core material that might otherwise never have been accessed. The psychoanalyst's working context convulsed as the subject of the Holocaust surged into the treatment, awakening internal and transgenerational reverberations and triggering aggression and regression in patient and analyst alike. Both struggled with projections and memory to reconcile their roles as inheritors of historic pasts and as agents of that history with their present search for individuality and growth.