A composite reading of varying reports circulating through the mental health community of the United States suggests that a new and unique group is emerging into a historical niche at this time — the children of those individuals who survived imprisonment in Nazi concentration camps or Soviet labor camps during the Second World War. Although these children may range on a mental health continuum from extremely healthy to extremely maladjusted, they all, nevertheless, seem deeply affected by the experience of their parents. The particular trauma at issue, the Holocaust, seems to exert an influence on either health or illness in the children, depending upon how the parents adapted to postwar life and to their parenting functions.