Man' Search For Meaning Part 3

MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING

VIKTOR E. FRANKL

WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS                        1959

PART III

 

PART ONE: EXPERIENCES IN A CONCENTRATION CAMP (Cont)

 

• As the inner life of the prisoner tended to become more intense, he also experienced the beauty of art and nature as never before. Under their influence he sometimes even forgot his own frightful circumstances.
• Is there such a thing as art in a concentration camp? It rather depends on what one chooses to call art.
• A kind of cabaret was improvised from time to time. There were songs, poems, jokes, some with underlying satire regarding the camp. All were meant to help us forget, and they did help.
• The gatherings were so effective that a few ordinary prisoners went to see the cabaret in spite of their fatigue even though they missed their daily portion of food by going.
• To discover that there was any semblance of art in a concentration camp must be surprise enough for an outsider, but he may be even more astonished to hear that one could find a sense of humor there as well.
• Humor was another of the soul’s weapons in the fight for self-preservation. I practically trained a friend of mine who worked next to me on the building site to develop a sense of humor. I suggested to him that we would promise each other to invent one amusing story daily, about some incident that could happen one day after our liberation.
• He was an assistant surgeon on the staff of a large hospital so I tried to get him to smile by describing to him how he would be unable to lose the habits of camp life when he returned to his former work.
• On the building site the foreman encouraged us to work faster by shouting: “Action! Action!”
• I told my friend: “One day you will be back in the operating room, performing a big abdominal operation. Suddenly an orderly will rush in announcing the arrival of the senior surgeon by shouting, ‘Action! Action!’”
• The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of trick learned while mastering the art of living. Yet it is possible to practice the art of living even in a concentration camp, although suffering is omnipresent.
• A man’s suffering is similar to the behavior of gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the “size” of human suffering is absolutely relative.
• It also follows that a very trifling thing can cause the greatest joys. How we envied those of us who had the opportunity to get into a factory and work in a sheltered room! It was everyone’s wish to have such a lifesaving piece of luck.
• We were grateful for the smallest of mercies. We were glad when there was time to delouse before going to bed, although in itself this was no pleasure, as it meant standing naked in an unheated hut where icicles hung from the ceiling. But we were thankful if there was no air raid alarm during this operation and the lights were not switched off. If we could not do the job properly, we were kept awake half the night.
• Cook F. stood behind one of the huge pans and ladled soup into the bowls which were held out to him by the prisoners, who hurriedly filed past. He was the only cook who did not look at the men whose bowls he was filling; the only cook who dealt out the soup equally, regardless of recipient, and who did not make favorites of his personal friends or countrymen, picking out the potatoes for them, while others got watery soup skimmed from the top.
• It is not for me to pass judgment on those prisoners who put their own people above everyone else. Who can throw a stone at a man who favors his friends under circumstances when, sooner or later, it is a question of life and death? No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.
• On my fourth day in the sick quarters I had just been detailed to the night shift when the chief doctor rushed in and asked me to volunteer for medical duties in another camp containing typhus patients. Against the urgent advice of my friends (and despite the fact that almost none of my colleagues offered their services), I decided to volunteer.
• I knew that in a working party I would die in a short time. But if I had to die there might at least be some sense in my death. I thought that it would doubtless be more to the purpose to try and help my comrades as a doctor than to vegetate or finally lose my life as the unproductive laborer that I was then. For me this was simple mathematics, not sacrifice.
• A man’s character became involved to the point that he was caught in a mental turmoil which threatened all the values he held and threw them into doubt. Under the influence of a world which no longer recognized the value of human life and human dignity, which had robbed man of his will and had made him an object to be exterminated (having planned, however, to make full use of him first – to the last ounce of his physical resources) – under this influence the personal ego finally suffered a loss of values.
• If the man in the concentration camp did not struggle against this in a last effort to save his self-respect, he lost the feeling of being an individual, a being with a mind, with inner freedom and personal value. He thought of himself then as only a part of an enormous mass of people; his existence descended to the level of animal life.
• It is very difficult for an outsider to grasp how very little value was placed on human life in camp. The camp inmate was hardened, but possibly became more conscious of this complete disregard of human existence when a convoy of sick men was arranged.
• The emaciated bodies of the sick were thrown on two-wheeled carts which were drawn by prisoners for many miles, often through snowstorms, to the next camp. If one of the sick men had died before the cart left, he was thrown on anyway – the list had to be correct! The list was the only thing that mattered.
• In Auschwitz I had laid down a rule for myself which proved to be a good one and which most of my comrades later followed. I generally answered all kinds of questions truthfully. But I was silent about anything that was not expressly asked for.
• When the transport of sick patients for the “rest camp” was organized, my name (that is, my number) was put on the list, since a few doctors were needed.
• The chief doctor, who had taken a liking to me, told me furtively on evening at a quarter to ten, “I have made it known in the orderly room that you can still have your name crossed off the list; you may do so up till ten o’clock. I told him that this was not my way; that I had learned to let fate take its course.
• There was a look of pity in his eyes, as if he knew … He shook my hand silently, as though it were a farewell, not for life, but from life.
• “Listen, Otto, if I don’t get back home to my wife, and if you should see her again, then tell her that I talked of her daily, hourly. You remember. Secondly, I have loved her more than anyone. Thirdly, the short time I have been married to her outweighs everything, even all we have gone through here.”
• The next morning I departed with the transport. This time it was not a ruse. We were not heading for the gas chambers, and we actually did go to a rest camp.
• Those who had pitied me remained in a camp where famine was to rage even more fiercely than in our new camp. They tried to save themselves, but they only sealed their own fates.
• As the battle-front drew nearer, I had the opportunity to escape. Suddenly I decided to take fate into my own hands for once. I ran out of the hut and told my friend that I could not go with him. As soon as I had told him with finality that I had made up my mind to stay with my patients, the unhappy feeling left me.
• I did not know what the following days would bring, but I had gained an inward peace that I had never experienced before.
• Our last day in camp arrived. As the battle-front came nearer, mass transports had taken nearly all the prisoners to other camps. The camp must be evacuated completely by sunset. At night the camp was to be set on fire.
• In the afternoon the trucks which were to collect the sick had not yet appeared. Instead the camp gates were suddenly closed and the barbed wire closely watched, so that no one could attempt an escape.
• The remaining prisoners seemed to be destined to burn with the camp. For the second time my friend and I decided to escape. We had been given an order to bury three men outside the barbed-wire fence. We were the only two in camp who had strength enough to do the job.
• When we took out the second body we would also carry out my rucksack, and on the third trip we intended to make our escape. I waited while my friend tried to find a piece of bread. Minutes passed. I became more impatient as he did not return.
• The very moment when my friend came back, the camp gate was thrown open. A splendid, aluminum-colored car, on which were painted large red crosses, slowly rolled on to the parade ground. A delegate from the International Red Cross in Geneva had arrived, and the camp and its inmates were under his protection.
• But that night the SS arrived with trucks and brought an order to clear the camp. The last remaining prisoners were to be taken to a central camp, from which they would be sent to Switzerland within forty-eight hours – to be exchanged for some prisoners of war. We scarcely recognized the SS. They were so friendly.
• The chief doctor counted out the requisite number, but he omitted the two of us. The thirteen were loaded into the truck and we had to stay behind.
• Finally we lay down on the mattresses of the deserted guard-room, exhausted by the excitement of the last few hours and days, during which we had fluctuated continuously between hope and despair. We slept in our clothes and shoes, ready for the journey.
• The noise of rifles and cannons woke us up. The battle-front had reached us! Many weeks later we found out that even in those last hours fate had toyed with us few remaining prisoners.
• Our friends who had thought they were traveling to freedom that night had been taken in the trucks to this camp, and there they were locked in the huts and burned to death.
• The majority of prisoners suffered from a kind of inferiority complex. We all had once been or had fancied ourselves to be “somebody.” Now we were treated like complete nonentities. (The consciousness of one’s inner value is anchored in higher, more spiritual things, and cannot be shaken by camp life. But how many free men, let alone prisoners, possess it?)
• Without consciously thinking about it, the average prisoner felt himself utterly degraded. The more “prominent” prisoners, the capos, the cooks, the store-keepers and the camp policemen, did not, as a rule, feel degraded, but on the contrary – promoted! Some even developed miniature delusions of grandeur.
• Whenever the degraded majority and the promoted minority came into conflict the results were explosive.
• While I was working as a doctor in the typhus block, I also had to take the place of the senior block warden who was ill, with responsibility for keeping the hut clean – if “clean” can be used to describe such a condition.
• It took tremendous self-control not to strike the inmates. For one’s own irritability took on enormous proportions in the face of the other’s apathy and especially in the face of the danger (i.e., the approaching inspection) which was caused by it.
• Do the prisoners; reactions to the singular world of the concentration camp prove that man cannot escape the influences of his surroundings? Does man have no choice of action in the face of such circumstances?
• The experiences of camp life show that man does have a choice of action. There were enough examples, often of a heroic nature, which proved that apathy could be overcome, irritability suppressed. Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress.
• We can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.