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Historically, the marker event for the identifiability of children of survivors as a group was the seminal article in The New York Times by journalist Helen Epstein, herself a child of Holocaust survivors, on June 19, 1977, and her subsequent book, Children of the Holocaust (Epstein, 1979). Although the psychological literature had articles dating back to the work of Vivian Rakoff and John Sigal in 1966, these were unnoticed for the most part.
The emergence of a second-generation consciousness, and resultantly the development of an identifiable group, has its origin in the “roots” movement in the United States in the mid-1970s; in the more manifest anti-Semitism in Europe in the early and mid-1980s; and more recently in Israel, during the showing of Claude Lanzmann's Shoah and the Demjanjuk Trial, which resulted in a restored dignity of Holocaust survivors.
When a group such as the second-generation of Holocaust survivors becomes identifiable among the multitude of victims in society all sorts of characteristics are attributed to its members. Individuals in classified victim groups tend to lose their unique identity. Furthermore, there appears to be a premise that it is negative attributes that define such a group. Even if an attribute is generally considered positive (e.g., helping others), in cases of individuals in so called victim groups, such behavior is explained in negative terms or as a defense, rather than understanding it as a positive coping mechanism.
The psychological consequences of being a child of Holocaust survivors has been labelled as “second-generation survivor syndrome,” “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder” and “Second Generation