Tuesday, October 17, 2017

All is Lost, All is Found

“We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.”

Shortly after Pearl Harbor, the American consulate in Vienna issued a visa to the Jewish psychotherapist Viktor Frankl. But it was only for him and not for his parents. He was torn. He knew it not be long before the Nazis would transport all the Jews to the death camps.
He went for a walk, hoping for “a hint from heaven.” Upon returning home, his father told him he had brought home part of a marble slab from a synagogue that had been burned to the ground. Frankl studied it. A portion of one of the Ten Commandments was inscribed on it. He could make out enough to see that the complete sentence was “Honor thy father and thy mother.”
Frankl decided to stay with his parents.
They then spent nearly two years in Theresienstadt, which was both a ghetto and concentration camp. Frankl received news he was to be shipped to Auschwitz. His wife worked in a munitions factory. She got no such orders. She was too valuable to be taken from her post. Frankl told her to stay. Instead, without his knowledge, she volunteered to go on the same train with him to the death camp.
Before leaving, she sewed the manuscript of his new book on psychotherapy into the lining of his jacket. That way the Nazis at Auschwitz wouldn’t get it.
Frankl recalled thinking as he approached its gates, “No one could yet grasp the fact that everything would be taken away.”
He confided to an older prisoner, “I must keep [this manuscript] at all costs,”
“Shit,” the prisoner replied.
The guards took everything from Frankl—his clothes and, of course, the hidden manuscript and even his hair which was shorn off to prevent the spread of disease.
Guards did let Frankl keep his belt and his shoes.
“I struck out my whole former life,” he recalled. “All we possessed, literally, was our naked existence.”

He became #119,104

There was one thing that Frankl realized the guards and the horrors of the death camp could not take from him—His spiritual freedom—his attitude towards the reality confronting him.
Frankl became #119,014. He lost his parents, his wife, and his brother in the camps. He slaved as a laborer at Auschwitz and Dachau worked as a physician at Turkheim.
After being liberated, in nine days he wrote the book “Man’s Search for Meaning." It has since been translated into 24 languages. More than 12 million copies have been printed. It is generally regarded as one of the greatest written works of the 20th century.
Frankl came to believe that the purpose of life is not about the pursuit of pleasure, power, or glory. The purpose of life is the pursuit of meaning. He writes that even when a person is subjected to the most brutal degradation, no one can rob him of his spiritual power to transform seemingly meaningless suffering into a noble achievement.
“When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task,” Frankl writes. “He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden."
Everyone, regardless of the plight they find themselves in, must "face up to the full amount of suffering, trying to keep moments of weakness and furtive tears to a minimum." In the camps, Frankl said there "was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer. Only very few realized that."


If you were alive, you could have hope. "Health, family, happiness, professional abilities, fortune, position in society—all these were things that could be achieved again or restored," he wrote. He understood that if one is resilient enough the suffering one endures can be turned into an asset—something that strengthens the soul.
            Often it was only hope—and hope alone—that kept inmates alive. Many made the mistake of thinking they would be freed by a certain date, perhaps Christmas. When that date came and went, so did their will to live. Wrote Frankl: “The prisoner who had lost faith in the future—his future—was doomed.”

"Fate was one's master"

            In retrospect, Frankl estimated that he had only a one-in-20 chance of surviving. What kept him Frankl alive?
He says he had an “inborn optimism.”
His training as a psychiatrist made him a good listener. On at least one occasion he says a guard took a liking to him “because [he] listened to his love stories and matrimonial troubles.”
He believed that those with sensitive natures had a better chance of surviving, even though they might have been less physically robust. “Sensitive people who were used to a rich intellectual life may have suffered much pain (they were often of a delicate constitution), but the damage to their inner selves was less,” he writes. “They were able to retreat from their terrible surroundings to a life of inner riches and spiritual freedom.”
He accepted the reality of his situation. “I just waited for things to take their course….Fate was one’s master, and [I learned] that one must not try to influence it in any way," he said.
Frankl watched other prisoners try to outwit fate by guessing which work details might offer a chance for freedom. For example, on one occasion his “friends who had thought they were traveling to freedom that night had been taken in the trucks to [such-and-such] camp, and there they were locked in the huts and burned to death."
Frankl even put his sense of humor to work. Grim laughter was also a survival tool, “another of the soul’s weapons in the fight for self-preservation.”
But, most of all, what kept Frankl and others alive was love. He believed that if anyone in a survival situation can focus their imagination on a beloved, that awareness gives the strength to live another day.
            "Nothing could touch the strength of my love, my thoughts, and the image of my beloved,” he writes. “Had I known then that my wife was dead, I think that I would still have given myself, undisturbed by that knowledge, to the contemplation of her image, and that my mental conversation with her would have been just as vivid and just as satisfying….
            “The truth—that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: the salvation of man is through love and in love.”
            Those who survived conquered fear forever, according to Frankl. For the rest of their lives they would fear nothing—except God.


MORAL: Be worthy.

Buy the book "Courage 101: True Tales of Grit & Glory" at Amazon!

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