. >> reporter: 59-year-old karen sonneberg grew up on the north shore of long island, just an hour's drive from new york city. her parents survived the holocaust but rarely mentioned it. >> all i knew was that we were different, that i was different. i didn't exactly know why. >> reporter: her parents were jewish, born in germany, but after hitler came to power, their families fled. sonneberg's parents were just children but carried the traumas of nazi oppression throughout their lives. >> my mother from the time she was three on, for my father, from the time he was five or six-years-old, he was subjected to the painful existence in germany. >> reporter: despite her own comfortable upbringing here in the u.s., sonneberg privately struggled for years with anxiety and stress. while she couldn't prove it, she believed it was somehow linked to her parents' traumatic childhoods. >> having discussed this with many of my friends who come from similar backgrounds, it seems to be consistent in most of us, or there were definitely challenges that "american" kids didn't seem to have experienced