We stumbled on in the darkness, over big stones and through
large puddles, along the one road leading from the camp. The accompanying
guards kept shouting at us and driving us with the butts of their rifles.
Anyone with very sore feet supported himself on his neighbor's arm. 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. Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the
stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread
behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife's image, imagining
it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile,
her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous
than the sun which was beginning to rise.
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 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. I understood
how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be
it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a
position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive
action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings
in the right way – an honorable way – in such a position man
can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved,
achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand
the meaning of the words, "The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation
of an infinite glory."
In front of me a man stumbled and those following him fell on top of him.
The guard rushed over and used his whip on them all. Thus my thoughts
were interrupted for a few minutes. But soon my soul found its way back
from the prisoner's existence to another world, and I resumed talk with
my loved one: I asked her questions, and she answered; she questioned
me in return, and I answered.
"Stop!" We had arrived at our work site. Everybody rushed into
the dark hut in the hope of getting a fairly decent tool. Each prisoner
got a spade or a pickaxe.
"Can't you hurry up, you pigs?" Soon we had resumed the previous
day's positions in the ditch. The frozen ground cracked under the point
of the pickaxes, and sparks flew. The men were silent, their brains numb.
My mind still clung to the image of my wife. A thought crossed my mind:
I didn't even know if she were still alive. I knew only one thing –
which I have learned well by now: Love goes very far beyond the physical
person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being,
his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not
he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance.
I did not know whether my wife was alive, and I had no means of finding
out (during all my prison life there was no outgoing or incoming mail);
but at that moment it ceased to matter. There was no need for me to know;
nothing could touch the strength of my love, my thoughts, and the image
of my beloved. 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. "Set me like a seal upon thy
heart, love is as strong as death."
This intensification of inner life helped the prisoner find
a refuge from the emptiness, desolation and spiritual poverty of his existence,
by letting him escape into the past. When given free rein, his imagination
played with past events, often not important ones, but minor happenings
and trifling things. His nostalgic memory glorified them and they assumed
a strange character. Their world and their existence seemed very distant
and the spirit reached out for them longingly: In my mind I took bus rides,
unlocked the front door of my apartment, answered my telephone, switched
on the electric lights. Our thoughts often centered on such details, and
these memories could move one to tears.
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. If
someone had seen our faces on the journey from Auschwitz to a Bavarian
camp as we beheld the mountains of Salzburg with their summits glowing
in the sunset, through the little barred windows of the prison carriage,
he would never have believed that those were the faces of men who had
given up all hope of life and liberty. Despite that factor – or
maybe because of it – we were carried away by nature's beauty, which
we had missed for so long.
In camp, too, a man might draw the attention of a comrade working next
to him to a nice view of the setting sun shining through the tall trees
of the Bavarian woods (as in the famous water color by Dürer), the
same woods in which we had built an enormous, hidden munitions plant.
One evening, when we were already resting on the floor of our hut, dead
tired, soup bowls in hand, a fellow prisoner rushed in and asked us to
run out to the assembly grounds and see the wonderful sunset. Standing
outside we saw sinister clouds glowing in the west and the whole sky alive
with clouds of ever-changing shapes and colors, from steel blue to blood
red. The desolate grey mud huts provided a sharp contrast, while the puddles
on the muddy ground reflected the glowing sky. Then, after minutes of
moving silence, one prisoner said to another, "How beautiful the
world could be!"
Another time we were at work in a trench. The dawn was grey around us;
grey was the sky above; grey the snow in the pale light of dawn; grey
the rags in which my fellow prisoners were clad, and grey their faces.
I was again conversing silently with my wife, or perhaps I was struggling
to find the reason for my sufferings, my slow dying. In a last violent
protest against the hopelessness of imminent death, I sensed my spirit
piercing through the enveloping gloom. I felt it transcend that hopeless,
meaningless world, and from somewhere I heard a victorious "Yes"
in answer to my question of the existence of an ultimate purpose. At that
moment a light was lit in a distant farmhouse, which stood on the horizon
as if painted there, in the midst of the miserable grey of a dawning morning
in Bavaria. "Et lux in tenebris lucet” – and
the light shineth in the darkness. For hours I stood hacking at the icy
ground. The guard passed by, insulting me, and once again I communed with
my beloved. More and more I felt that she was present, that she was with
me; I had the feeling that I was able to touch her, able to stretch out
my hand and grasp hers. The feeling was very strong; she was there.
Then, at that very moment, a bird flew down silently and perched just
in front of me, on the heap of soil which I had dug up from the ditch,
and looked steadily at me.
- - -
As we said before, any attempt to restore a man’s
inner strength in the camp had first to succeed in showing him some future
goal. Nietzsche’s words, “He who has a why to live for can
bear with almost any how,” could be the guiding motto for
all psychotherapeutic and psycho-hygenic efforts regarding prisoners.
Whenever there was an opportunity for it, one had to give them a why –
an aim – for their lives, in order to strengthen them to bear the
terrible how of their existence. Woe to him who saw no more sense
in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on.
He was soon lost. The typical reply with which such a man rejected all
encouraging arguments was, “I have nothing to expect from life any
more.” What sort of answer can one give to that?
What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward
life. 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. We needed to stop asking about
the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were
being questioned by life – daily and hourly. Our answer must consist,
not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct.
Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer
to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for
each individual.
These tasks, and therefore the meaning of life, differ from man to man,
and from moment to moment. Thus it is impossible to define the meaning
of life in a general way. Questions about the meaning of life can never
be answered by sweeping statements. "Life" does not mean something
vague, but something very real and concrete, just as life's tasks are
also very real and concrete. They form man's destiny, which is different
and unique for each individual. No man and no destiny can be compared
with any other man or any other destiny. No situation repeats itself,
and each situation calls for a different response. Sometimes the situation
in which a man finds himself may require him to shape his own fate by
action. At other times it is more advantageous for him to make use of
an opportunity for contemplation and to realize assets in this way. Sometimes
man may be required simply to accept fate, to bear his cross. Every situation
is distinguished by its uniqueness, and there is always only one right
answer to the problem posed by the situation at hand.
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. 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.
For us, as prisoners, these thoughts were not speculations far removed
from reality. They were the only thoughts that could be of help to us.
They kept us from despair, even when there seemed to be no chance of coming
out of it alive. Long ago we had passed the stage of asking what was the
meaning of life, a naive query which understands life as the attaining
of some aim through the active creation of something of value. For us,
the meaning of life embraced the wider cycles of life and death, of suffering
and of dying.
- - -
For too long a time, for half a century in fact, psychiatry
tried to interpret the human mind merely as a mechanism, and consequently
the therapy of mental disease merely in terms of a technique. I believe
this dream has been dreamt out. What now begins to loom on the horizon
are not the sketches of a psychologized medicine but rather those of a
humanized psychiatry.
A doctor, however, who would still interpret his own role mainly as that
of a technician, would confess that he sees in his patient nothing more
than a machine, instead of seeing the human being behind the disease!
A human being is not one thing among others; things determine
each other, but man is ultimately self-determining. What he becomes
– within the limits of endowment and environment – he has
made out of himself. In the concentration camps, for example, in this
living laboratory and on this testing ground we watched and witnessed
some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints.
Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends
on decisions but not on conditions.
Our generation is realistic for we have come to know man as he really
is. After all, man is that being who has invented the gas chambers of
Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who has entered those gas chambers
upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.
- - -
Source: Victor Frankl Man’s Search for Meaning:
an introduction to logotherapy, translated by Ilse Lasch. Beacon
Press.