Off the Cuff / My Other Journal

Finding Meaning with Viktor Frankl and Auschwitz

I am reading Viktor Frankl’s memoirs titled, Man’s Search for Meaning, which begins with Harold Kushner’s excellent foreword. Both Frankl and Kushner quote Nietzche: ”He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.”

So true!

Viktor Emil Frankl, MD, PhD, (1905-1997) was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist who survived the Holocaust in Auschwitz. He became one of the key figures in existential therapy and humanistic psychology.

Frankl’s memoirs are incredibly poignant, aside from describing the horrors of Auschwitz. They impress on the fact of keeping hope alive under unbelievably terrible circumstances. Rather than stressing on the fact why so many people died as many other Holocaust accounts do, Frankl concerns himself to find answers to why anyone survived at all under those horrendous circumstances, because survival had to be a true miracle.

As Kushner says, “Terrible as it was, his (Frankl’s) experience in Auschwitz reinforced what was already one of his key ideas: Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life.”

In this, I believe, Kushner and Frankl are correct. To find meaning is why most of us do what we do, be it, concentrating on our families, our work, our art, or our writing. That is why a piece of fiction or poetry is successful when it shows meaning, an ahha! moment, an epiphany, or a personal truth.

Situations beyond our control can do away with everything we may value, except for our freedom, which is choosing how to respond to a situation. That means we can choose how to feel and how to react under any dire circumstance.

In that vein, Frankl says, “As the inner life of the prisoner tended to become more intense, he also experienced the beauty of art and nature as never before.”

That meant whatever could be considered art or beauty under those horrific circumstances. The author relates that walking from the camp to worksites, prisoners admired the sunsets and nature, and inside their heads, came up with scenarios concerning their past lives. Frankl, for example, “took bus rides, unlocked the front door of his apartment, answered his phone, switched on the electric lights,” occupying his mind with his past’s minute details. What saved his sanity the most, however, was his imaginary discussions with his wife--whose whereabouts or whether she was dead or alive he didn’t know.

I found this to be a major lesson. It gave me another weapon of survival. If pushed into the corner, I decided to ask questions to my favorite uncle, who is deceased, and answer them as he would answer. I’m sure, this will help me, should I find myself in a tight situation.

Frankl also gives great importance to humor for overcoming difficulties. “Humor was another of the soul’s weapons in the fight for self-preservation…

“The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a 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.”

He goes on to relate that prisoners invented comical situations and dreams about a better future. They even joked among themselves.

Imagine that!

Auschwitz was a miniscule replica of any animal (or inhuman) group. In the camp, they used prisoners against prisoners by promoting a minority of them to rule, most of the time, viciously over the majority, for which Frankl uses the terms degraded majority versus promoted minority.

“It is very difficult for an outsider to grasp how very little value was placed on human life in camp.”

A prisoner “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.”

Frankl continues to say, “at the end the man’s existence descended to the level of animal life” and that was how the prisoners became herds of men.

Very few books have affected me as this survivor’s memoirs did, and I haven’t finished the book yet. Even though I have read only 41% of it, as my Kindle indicates, I felt like writing about it.

This is due to more than my feelings of empathy for those who suffered in World War II and the Holocaust. It is that something so incredibly human in Frankl’s words, that something which hits me smack on the heart.

http://www.amazon.com/Mans-Search-Meaning-Viktor-Frankl/dp/080701429X