The author's long experience in working with orphans, especially those created by the war years, affords him the material to discuss the effect of the Holocaust on these children. However, expressing that experience linguistically is difficult, and it seems beyond language for him, as it is for the individuals who experienced it. This is a brief but well-argued and moving discussion of the difficulties in verbal transmission of the experience of the Holocaust and of the difficulties in reaching into the world of the orphans who survived their experiences in the camps. Language, flight into metaphor, allusion, all fail in the attempt to describe the experiences of a world where language breaks down and does not reach.