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As in previous years I have chosen to participate in Holocaust Memorial day by reading a Holocaust memoir.  Viktor E. Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning — first published in 1946 shortly after the author’s release from Auschwitz — is one of the most famous, and that is because it’s a work of ‘survival literature’ that is also, as it says on the cover, a ‘classic tribute to hope from the Holocaust.’

It’s also a book that reinforces the contemporary usefulness of the philosophy of stoicism.  (See my review of Reasons Not to Worry, how to be stoic in chaotic times (2022) by Brigid Delaney).  As Harold Kushner says in his Preface:

Frankl’s most enduring insight, one that I have called on often in my own life and in countless counselling sessions, [is that] forces beyond your control can take away everything that you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.  You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you. (p.8)

The remarkable aspect of Frankl’s philosophy is that it emerged from his experiences in the Theresienstadt concentration camp,  Auschwitz and two other camps.  His father perished in Theresienstadt; his mother and brother were murdered at Auschwitz; and his wife, from whom he was separated after just nine months of marriage, perished in Bergen-Belsen. Yet on his release he returned to his work as a psychotherapist and went on to found a school of psychotherapy called logotherapy, predicated on the belief that a search for a life’s meaning is the central human motivational force.

There are two parts to the book. The first part is not so much about his experiences in the camps — as he says in the preface written for a 1992 edition, there are many of those — but about the factors that contributed to his survival.  Contrary to other memoirs I’ve read, which suggest that no factor other than ‘luck’ made a difference, Frankl recognises ‘luck’ in his initial ‘selection’ for work rather than the gas chambers, but also suggests that standing confidently and looking healthy was a choice he made because he wanted to survive for his family.

But it was Hitler’s ultimate goal to kill all the Jews, so such choices could only defer the inevitable, surely? If Britain and her empire had not stood alone in the first years of the war, if the USSR had not turned the German advance back at Stalingrad, and had D-Day failed, the Final Solution would have prevailed.

Frankl describes the different psychological stages experienced by inmates, starting with their shock and disbelief, and longing for family and concern about them.  This was followed by a stage of apathy and deadened emotions, characterised by ceasing to care, and being unmoved by the sufferings of others because it was a commonplace daily occurrence. Yet he writes about how it was possible for a spiritual life to emerge.

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. They were able to retreat from their terrible surroundings to a life of inner riches and spiritual freedom.  Only in this way can one explain the apparent paradox that some prisoners of a less hardy makeup often seemed to survive camp life better than did those of a robust nature. (p.47)

He gives an example from his own experience, tramping to work in brutal weather, hungry, cold, badly shod and clothed and subjected to beatings along the way.

Hardly a word was spoken; the icy wind did not encourage talk.  Hiding his mouth behind his upturned collar, the man marching next to me whispered suddenly, ‘If our wives could see us now! I do hope they are better off in their camps and don’t know what is happening to us.’

That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind.  And as we stumbled on for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, dragging one another up and onward, nothing was said, but we both knew: each of us was thinking of his wife.’ (p.48)

With the image of wife before him, her smile, her frank and encouraging look…

A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers.  The truth — that love is the ultimate and 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. (p.48-9)

He did at that time not know about the fate of his wife, and he had no means of finding out since there was never any mail during his imprisonment, but he was sustained by his love for her.  And — writing this book after the war when he did know what had happened to her — he remains convinced that he would have felt the same way even if he had known she was already dead.

He writes too about how being open to occasional moments of beauty was sustaining — a sunset visible through the trees; a light in a distant farmhouse, like a painting; and the efforts at humour and entertainment through drama and song.  He shares a couple of macabre jokes about a future life, as a kind of trick learned while mastering the art of living even in a concentration camp. ‘Trifling things’ such as a train following one track and not another could bring a moment of joy, when they were being transported to a new camp on a train line which did not lead to a camp with a crematorium.

Frankl writes that the prisoner who had lost faith in the future — his future — was doomed because apathy took over and they gave up the struggle, and they rescinded their opportunity to make choices that helped their survival, (even if just whether to trade a cigarette for food).  He believed that in reality, there was an opportunity and a challenge.

One could make a victory of those experiences, turning life into an inner triumph, or one could ignore the challenge and simply vegetate, as did a majority of the prisoners. (p.81)

Indeed, the chief doctor of their camp attributed the increase in death rates between Christmas 1944 and New Year 1945 not to any change in working conditions or food supplies, but to the inmates’ hope that they would be home by Christmas, and they lost courage and sank into despair when these hopes were not fulfilled.

Frankl concludes this section with the third psychological stage — the psychology of the prisoner who has been released.  He writes about the sense of disbelief, the effects of daily pressures being eased, about bitterness and disillusionment.

When we spoke about attempts to give a man in camp mental courage, we said that he had to be shown something to look forward to in the future.  He had to be reminded that life still waited for him, that a human being waited for his return.  But after liberation? There were some men who found that no one awaited them.  Woe to him who found that the person whose memory alone had given him courage in camp did not exist any more! Woe to him who, when the day of his dreams finally came, found it so different from all he had longed for! (p.99)

It’s sobering reading.

The second part of the book is called ‘Logotherapy in a Nutshell’ and you can read a modern interpretation of this therapy here.

Claire from 746 books reviewed this book at Goodreads.

This year’s theme for the annual Holocaust Memorial Day is ‘Fragility of Freedom’.  You can read more about it here.

Author: Viktor E. Frankl
Title: Man’s Search for Meaning
Part One translated from the German by Ilse Lasch
Preface by Harold S Kushner
Publisher: Rider, 2008, first published in Germany in 1946 and in translation in 1959
Cover design by Two Associates
ISBN: 9781846041242, pbk., 154 pages
Source: Personal library, purchased from Ironbird Bookshop, Port Fairy, $16.99

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