Viktor Frankl: Man’s Search for Meaning, Reflections on Auschwitz Concentration Camp

Today we will learn and reflect Viktor Frankl’s reflections on surviving
the Auschwitz work camps under the Nazi regime.
Ninety percent of the Jews arriving at Auschwitz were waved to the
death camps, where the shower heads pumped in poison gas into the
showers so soon after they stepped off the trains. But for those few
Jews who were waved to work in the work camps, where the shower
heads sprayed real refreshing water, were instead slowly worked and
starved to death, and only one in 28 would survive to the end of the
war. Often the physically strong prisoners perished, those prisoners
who had meaning in their lives, who had a richer interior spiritual and
intellectual life, were more likely to survive. But as Viktor Frankl
remembers, the best of them did not survive.

Man’s Search for Meaning touched me deeply when I first read it many
years ago, it taught that no matter what your situation in life is, or how
busy you are, you always have time to be kind to all those whom you
encounter, to be a positive influence on the lives whom you touch.
Although he never mentions stoicism, his account of how he survived
Auschwitz is a living example how a stoic mindset can help you survive
and thrive through any challenge life may throw at you.
At the end of our talk, we will discuss the sources used for this video, and
my blogs that also cover this topic. Please, we welcome interesting
questions in the comments. Let us learn and reflect together!

YouTube Video:
Man’s Search for Meaning,
Reflections from the Auschwitz Death Camps
https://youtu.be/O-YtC9qGWPI
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Most books progress, with many chapters, each chapter tell different events, or different people,
or different phases of life, usually progressing in some manner. But the story in Viktor Frankl’s
account of life in the Nazi concentration camps during World War II has only one chapter
describing a long dreary struggle for survival, unrelieved misery, each day running into the next,
no weekends, for a precious few a monotonous few years until the war ended, for some many,
many months of misery, for most, for nine out of ten Jews, they had left only days before they
stripped for showers not of streams of life-giving water but showers spewing noxious fumes into
gas chambers.
Viktor Frankl was on of the few of the ten percent whose first shower in Auschwitz sprayed life
giving water over their naked bodies, one of the few who survived years of what was the most
brutal slave society the world had ever seen, where formerly free men and women were torn
away from their families, whose luggage and their jewelry and clothes were taken, even their hair
shorn from them. The Nazis even strove to steal from them their humanity, taking away their
names, tattooing on their wrists the numbers they would be their new identity.
But yet the sign over the snowy entrance to the camp read in German, WORK WILL SET YOU FREE.

Viktor’s monotonous prisoner existence began in coach cars,
“Traveling by train for several days and nights,”
“Eighty people in each coach,” “lying on top of their luggage,”
Which was “the few remnants of all their personal possessions,”
Luggage was stacked so high it blocked most of “the grey of dawn.”
Crematoria II and III and their chimneys in the background, left and right.

Anxious passengers cried out, “There is a sign, Auschwitz!”
“Outlines of an immense camp, long stretches of barbed wire,”
“Watch towers, searchlights, long columns of trekking ragged human figures,”
Auschwitz the horrible, “gas chambers, crematoriums, massacres.”

For those slaves who were not among the slain, random beatings started,
Only one five-ounce piece of bread for these first four days,
Their well-fitting shoes were turned in for ill-fitting shoes,
“But when the showers started to run,” “We all tried to make fun,”
“Both about ourselves and about each other.”
“After all, real water did flow from the sprays!”

For each camp, below the camp commandant were the German guards,
mostly SS men, most selected for their sadistic cruelty. Then there were
the capos, also selected for their cruelty, who were well-fed Jewish
prisoners who assisted the guards, and who often exceeded the guards in
their cruelties. But men are always a mix of good and evil, and some
guards and some capos were only as cruel as they needed to be.

Viktor remembered there were some “guards who took pity on the
prisoners.” The camp doctor made it known that the camp
commandant “paid no small sum to purchase medicines from his own
pocket to purchase medicines for his prisoners.” In gratitude, after the
camp was liberated, some prisoners hid him in the woods until the
Allied commanders promised they would show him some mercy.

Viktor remembered that in the barracks of the work camp,
On each tier of the bunks slept nine men,” “directly on the boards,”
Shoulder to shoulder, two blankets for nine men,
“Lying on their sides,” huddled together against the bitter cold,
Turning in unison, arms or mud-caked shoes for pillows.

These prisoners learned how much desperate men could endure,
“Wearing the same shirts for half a year, losing all appearance of shirts,”
“For days unable to wash because of frozen water pipes,”
“Unable to clean their teeth,” “sores and abrasions on dirty hands.”
Miami Beach Holocaust Memorial

“Nearly everyone thought of suicide, if only for a brief time.”
“On my first evening I promised myself, I would not run into the wire,”
The electrically-charged barb wire for immediate rather than looming death.
“There was little point in committing suicide,” most “did not fear death.”

After a few weeks a colleague of Viktor snuck into his barracks
with advice. “Shave daily, with glass if you have to.” “If you want
to stay alive, there is only one way: look fit for work. If you even
limp, because of a blister on hour heel, and an SS man spots this,
he will wave you aside to be gassed. Do you know what we mean
by a ‘Moslem’? This is a man who looks miserable, down and out,
sick and emaciated, and who cannot manage hard physical labor
any longer. Sooner or later, usually sooner, every ‘Moslem’ goes
to the gas chambers. Therefore, remember: shave, stand and
walk smartly; then you need not be afraid of the gas.” And the
most important advice: “Do not be conspicuous.”

At first prisoners “were consumed with boundless longing for home and family,”
But cruel time would soon make him immune to meaningless beatings,
And screaming from beatings of other prisoners and meaningless cruelties,
Like the twelve year-old boy forced to stand for hours, barefoot in the snow,
For whom the doctor “picked off these black gangrenous stumps.”
These stumps that were toes, “he picked them off with tweezers, one by one.”

Auschwitz, Poland, 1941, Digging of the drainage ditch south of Gas Chamber II.
Most prisoners were marched out to work details in the snow,
Their ill-fitting shoes filling with snow, avoiding beatings from the cruel guards,
Beatings that could mean the end of the prisoner who slipped in the snow.
Viktor, “like nearly all camp inmates, was suffering from edema,”
“With swollen legs and skin so tightly stretched he could barely bend his knees,”
Walking in frost-bitten shoes in icy snow, “every step was real torture,”
Every slip and tumble answered with the butt of a rifle, Get Up! Get Up!

Small acts of kindness helped Viktor Frankl survive many monotonous cruelties.
One capo took a liking to him because Viktor, during those long marches,
Attentively “listened to his love stories and matrimonial troubles.”
This kind capo placed Viktor in the front lines to avoid the worst work parties,
And made sure that at lunch the cook, when Viktor’s time came in line,
“He dipped the ladle to the bottom of the vat to fish out a few peas.”

Freud, whose theories only
minimally influence current
psychological practice, thought that
repressed sexual drives propelled our
subconscious desires, but Viktor
Frankl disagrees, his theory posits
that Man’s Search For Meaning is
what drives him. Rabbi Kushner in
the Foreword to the book said that
“Frankl saw three possible sources
for meaning, in work, doing
something significant; in love, caring
for another person; and in courage
during difficult times.” Frankl saw
that this search for meaning is what
kept people alive in the death camps.
Was sex the innermost drive for
prisoners?

Prisoners in Auschwitz during liberation by the Soviet Red Army, January 1945
Viktor Frankl asks,
“What did the prisoner dream about most frequently?”
He dreamed of “bread, cake, cigarettes, and warm baths.”
“The lack of these simple desires led to their wish-fulfillment in dreams.”
The workers at Auschwitz were “skeletons with skin and rags,”
Never fed enough, only thin soup, small bread ration,
With scraps of sausage or cheese or a spoonful of jam.

When their bodies consumed their fat,
their “bodies devoured themselves,”
Protein and muscles disappeared,
the “body had no powers of resistance left.”

Those prisoners with a rich inner
spiritual life were more likely to
survive. Viktor Frankl remembers,
“In spite of all the enforced
physical and mental primitiveness
of life in a concentration camp, it
was possible for spiritual life to
deepen. Sensitive people who
were used to a rich intellectual life
may suffer more pain, 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
make-up often seemed to survive
camp life better than those who
were more robust.”

Viktor tells us, “The experiences
of camp life show that man does
have a choice of action. Apathy
can be overcome; irritability can
be suppressed. Man can
preserve a vestige of spiritual
freedom, of independence of
mind, even in terrible conditions
of psychic and physical stress.”
No matter how dire your
circumstances, you can always be
kind to those around you.

Although Frankl never mentions stoicism or any of the stoic philosophers
in his main published works, many of his observations are compatible
with stoic philosophy, particularly the philosophy of Epictetus, who said
that a tyrant may take everything you own and enslave you, but he can
never take away your inner freedom, your soul.

Epictetus says this: “Are you not scorched by the
rain? Are you not pressed by the crowd? Are you
not wet when it rains?” Has not the Lord granted
you the strength to endure all the trial life may
bring? “Have you not received greatness of soul?
Have you not received manliness? Have you not
received endurance? Why trouble yourself about
anything if you possess greatness of soul?” What
should our attitude be when facing life’s
difficulties? Should we cower like cowards in the
face of adversity? Do not cower, “bring now, O
Lord, any difficulty that thou pleases,” for You have
given me the means and power to bring honor to
myself through the difficulties I endure.”
EPICTETUS: ROMAN STOIC PHILOSOPHER

The Germans loaded Viktor and other prisoners into a transport,
The prisoners dreaded that the transport would take them to Mauthausen,
To their deaths, but the transport instead stopped at Dachau,
Dachau, a work camp of only a few thousand,
“no oven, no crematorium, no gas!”
This means anyone who becomes a ‘Moslem’ was safer,
Nobody could be “sent straight away to a gas chamber,”
They would have to wait for a “sick convoy to Auschwitz,”
Which to the Germans would be an administrative inconvenience.

Life at Dachau was slightly better, they had time to delouse at night,
The camp had a “cook who did not look at the men whose bowls he was filling,”
“The only cook who would deal out the soup equally, regardless of recipient.”
When he was in sick quarters, the “chief doctor rushed in,”
Asking Frankl to “volunteer for medical duties at a nearby camp.” He accepted,
And it was ordered that the doctor volunteers would “be taken care of,”
So they would turn into corpses before they could be transferred.
Gates at the main entrance to Dachau concentration camp, 1945

Snap decisions and pure chance often determined whether you would live or die.
Was this a forever rest camp? The chief doctor “who had taken a liking to Viktor,”
“Told him furtively that he could have his name crossed off the list.”
But “it was not a ruse, they were not heading for the death camp,”
“They actually did go to a rest camp.” Famine raged worse in the camp they left,
“A camp policeman confiscated from a cooking pot some missing human flesh.”
WWII Europe, Germany, Concentration Camps, "Piles of dead prisoners”

The day before their camp was liberated by the Allied armies,
There was another transport to another camp,
Viktor hid so he was not transported, this was also a fortunate decision,
These transported prisoners were locked in huts, then the camp was burned.
Polish prisoners in Dachau toast their liberation.

Viktor remembers, “One day, a few days after liberation, I walked and walked,
Miles and miles through flowering meadows, larks rising to the skies.
There was no one seen for miles around, nothing but the wide earth and sky,
Noting but the lark’s jubilation and the freedom of space.”
Viktor remembered the prayer, “I called to the Lord from my narrow prison,
The Lord answered me in the freedom of space.”
Fairchild Gardens, Miami, FL

Viktor Frankl’s reflections on Auschwitz end thus:
“For every one of the liberated prisoners, the day comes when, looking back
on his camp experiences, he can no longer understand how he endured it all.
As the day of his liberation eventually came, when everything seemed to him
like a beautiful dream, so also the day comes when all his camp experiences
seem to him nothing but a nightmare.”
Fairchild Gardens, Miami, FL

“The crowing
experience of all, for
the homecoming
man, is the
wonderful feeling
that, after all he has
suffered, there is
nothing he need
fear any more,
except for his God.”
Moses shows the Tables of the Law,
Exodus, Marc Chagall, 1966
Jew with Torah, Marc Chagall, 1925

SOURCES:
The main source of course is Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning,
which contains only two long chapters, the first longest chapter on his
survival in the Auschwitz Nazi work camps, and a shorter chapter on
how this experience helped shape his psychological system,
Logotherapy, which somewhat resembles CBT, or Cognitive Behavioral
Therapy, which also takes a stoic view of therapy that concentrates
more on solving the current problems people are facing in their lives
and less on searching for unresolved traumas in their early childhood.

Most people assume that there just a handful of really massive concentration
camps in Poland, whereas the real truth is Nazi Germany built a vast system of
thousands of slave labor camps across Germany and across all of conquered
Europe, manned by not only Jews but also by French POW’s, Spanish War
Republic veterans, political prisoners, including clergy, and civilians from France,
Czechoslovakia, Poland and other Eastern European countries, which Dr
Wikipedia reviews in his entry on the Nazi Concentration camp system.

Young survivors at the camp, liberated by the Red Army in January 1945

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_concentration_camps

One of the sources for our blog and upcoming 2021 video on how Christians
kept the faith in Nazi Germany is Victoria Barnett’s book, For the Soul of the
People. This book includes many interviews of ordinary Germans retelling their
personal experiences of both inmates and citizens of the towns where German
concentration were located, many of which were started in 1934 and after Hitler
assumed power. Some residents of these towns would often surreptitiously
pass bread and food to inmates marching to work assignments outside the camp
inside the towns. We are also planning a video where we read excerpts from the
interviews in this important book.

This book includes interviews of personal experiences of both camp inmates
and citizens of towns where German concentration were located.
2021 video, blog: https://wp.me/pachSU-mm
https://amzn.to/3828kJ0

For our liberation slides we had some happy backgrounds from the
Fairchild Gardens in Miami, a world class botanical gardens, which also
has some wonderful bike trails in the area.
And we have many photos from the Miami Beach Holocaust Memorial,
which also have many plaques honoring those Jews and entire families,
rich and poor, who lost their lives in the camps. These photos are hard
to bear, they illustrate how the Nazis strove to strip them the Jews of all
human dignity, some pictures of the ovens that burned the bodies of so
many Jews, many more pictures of the horrors of camp life for those
few Jews who were worked and starved to death, usually in a matter of
months, reminding us of Hannah Arendt’s haunting phrase describing
the Holocaust, the increasing banality of evil.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/193480080@N04/albums/72157719778759885

We have also uploaded our photos for the Holocaust Memorial to
Flickr so you can view the entire collection.
We challenge our viewers to view our videos on slavery before the
Civil War, and the experiences of former slaves and blacks during the
Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras, some of these stories
uncomfortably resemble the stories of the experience of the Jews in
the Nazi Concentration work camps during WWII.

The YouTube description links to the video script and our blog.
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Viktor Frankl: Man’s Search for Meaning, Reflections on Auschwitz Concentration Camp

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Viktor Frankl: Man’s Search for Meaning, Reflections on Auschwitz Concentration Camp