Rating: 4/5
Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning was, in short, a spectacular book. Frankl presents his autobiography of life in WWII concentration camps from a psychological perspective, mingling fascinating non-fiction with horrific memoir to create a beautiful book of motivation and hope in some of the most traumatic situations. Years in Auschwitz, among other Nazi concentration camps, taught Frankl that while suffering may be unavoidable in some circumstances, it is important and certainly possible to learn how to endure it until its end.
Frankl, a psychiatrist, noted that a sense of detachment and emotionlessness came soon to the new arrivals at Auschwitz, and highlights this as their spiritual and physical selves adjusting to their surroundings.
Disgust, horror and pity are emotions that our spectator could not really feel any more. The sufferers, the dying and the dead, became such commonplace sights to him after a few weeks of camp life that they could not move him any more.
At one point in the book Frankl is asked to lecture some of the inmates on how they can have hope for the future and thus have a higher chance of surviving the war. He makes lots of motivating and interesting comments throughout the book, but here especially were some of the most moving passages. He says that he’s tired of prisoners saying, “When we’re released…” “After the war…” “When all this is over…”, claiming that a life should have meaning, purpose and hope the whole way through: not after the most desperate situations, but during them, because that is what helps you through to the end.
He makes a point relevant to this claim here:
I said that someone looks down on each of us in difficult hours—a friend, a wife, somebody alive or dead, or a God—and he would not expect us to disappoint him. He would hope to find us suffering proudly—not miserably—knowing how to die. … I told them of a comrade who on his arrival in camp had tried to make a pact with Heaven that his suffering and death should save the human being he loved from a painful end. For this man, suffering and death were meaningful; his was a sacrifice of the deepest significance. He did not want to die for nothing. None of us wanted that.
A wonderfully written, beautiful book of hope in the most desperate circumstances.