“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.
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