Useful book excerpts – Man’s search for meaning by Victor Frankl

---

The entire episode is available for you to listen for free on my Spotify Podcast!

---

A few years prior to the war’s ending, Victor Frankl, an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist, found himself in the most infamous of all the Hitler’s concentration camps -Auschwitz. Against all odds, he made it out alive. From that unearthly experience, came the book – Man’s search for meaning. Initially titled A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp, the book started flying off shelves worldwide.

Later re-published as Man’s search for meaning, the book has since become one of the most iconic survival literature of our time. In it, he carefully and scientifically takes the reader through the psychology of experiences in the Concentration Camp, all the while the subtle underlying message being slammed in your face is this – Man’s suffering is like the behavior of gas. The same gas which fills a balloon fills another container of different shape and size, in that he means to show how relative suffering is. And from that comparison, he puts forth insights that the reader can readily utilize and apply in day to day life. The book is as relevant today as it was when it was first published.

I am documenting some of the more readily standing out excerpts from the book. Although, I would highly recommend people to read the book.

In the concentration camps, cigarette = currency. A single cigarette could be exchanged for 12 soups amongst other things. In that context he says,

“Thus, when we saw a comrade smoking his own cigarettes, we knew he had given up faith in his strength to carry on, and, once lost, the will to live seldom returned”

When the train, loaded with Jews and in which Victor Frankl found himself, arrived at Auschwitz, they initially saw healthy looking prisoners at the platform. And in that context he talks about the ‘Delusion of reprieve’ in which a condemned man, immediately before his execution, gets the illusion that he might be saved at the very last minute. And in that context he says,

“Just the sight of the red cheeks and round faces of those prisoners was a great encouragement. “

But little did they know, then, that these healthy prisoners were a part of a specially chosen elite, who for years had been the receiving squad for new transports as they rolled into the station day after day.

These men who received the incoming batch of Jews and other condemned humans, we prisoners themselves and,

“…who knew very well that one day they would be relived by a new shift of men, and that they would have to leave their enforced role of executioners and become victims themselves.”

But they still took on that role just to get some respite, and a false sense of hope even if it is evidently fleeting.

Everything was taken away from the incoming batch of prisoners – clothes, watches, jewelry, everything. Victor Frankl’s manuscript for a book he was working on at the time was taken away too. Regarding that,

“There were still naive prisoners among us who asked, to the amusement of the more seasoned ones who were there as helpers, if they could not keep a wedding ring, a medal or a good-luck piece. No one could yet grasp the fact that everything would be taken away.”

Once everything was taken from them, they were stripped naked and stuffed into a room with showers. In the group would be doctors, research scientists, economists, musicians, daily wage workers, and others, now naked and huddled in a tight bunch in a small room. And he says that at this point, most of them were overcome by a “grim sense of humor”

“We knew we had nothing to lose except our so ridiculously naked lives. ”

The showers in the room was meant to clean the prisoners and regarding this he says cooly,

“After all, real water did flow from the sprays!”

Apart from the grim sense of humor, Frankl observes another strange sensation developing in the mind’s of the new prisoners – curiosity.

“I have experienced this kind of curiosity before, as a fundamental reaction toward certain strange circumstances. When my life was once endangered by as climbing accident, I felt only one sensation at the critical moment: curiosity, curiosity as to whether I should come out of it alive or with a fractured skull or some other injuries. “

“We were anxious to know what would happen next; and what would be the consequence, for example, of our standing in the open air, in the chill of late autumn, stark naked, and still wet from the showers. In the new few days our curiosity evolved into surprise; surprise that we did not catch cold. “

At this point, Victor Frankl talks about Dostoevski’s famous statement that flatly defines man as a being who can get used to anything. Victor Frankl agrees with this but adds something that rings true like and reverberates in the reader’s body. He adds this,

“Yes, a man can get used to anything, but do not ask us how.”

---

The entire episode is available for you to listen for free on my Spotify Podcast!

---

Regarding the thought of suicide,

“The thought of suicide was entertained by nearly everyone, if only for a brief time. It was born of the hopelessness of the situation, the constant danger of death looming over us daily and hourly, and the closeness of the deaths suffered by many of the others. From personal convictions which will be mentioned later, I made myself a firm promise, on my first evening in camp, that I would not “run in to the wire”. This was a phrase used in camp to describe the most popular method of suicide-touching the electrically charged barbed-wire fence. It was not entirely difficult for me to make this decision. There was little point in committing suicide, since, for the average inmate, life expectations, calculating objectively and counting all likely chances, was very poor. He could not with any assurance expect to be among the small percentage of men who survived all the selections. The prisoner of Auschwitz, in the first phase of shock, did not fear death. Even the gas chambers lost their horrors for him after the first few days-after all, they spared him the act of committing suicide.”

Whatever it is, look young and look healthy.

“Quoting a helpful senior prisoner, “shave daily, if at all possible, even if you have to use a piece of glass to do it… even if you have to give your last piece of bread for it. You will look younger and the scraping will make your cheeks look ruddier. If you want to stay alive, there is only one way: look fit for work. If you even limp, because, let us say, you have a small blister on your heel, and an SS man spots this, he will wave you aside and the next day you are sure to be gassed.”

He describes the phases of prisoner reactions. He says, “An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior. He quotes Lessing, “There are things which must cause you to lose your reasons or you have none to lose.” Important one this.

In the first phase, he says the the prisoners went through a state of rude shock which slowly led to an emotional death. And consumed by longing. Then, there was also disgust with all the ugliness which surrounded him (“even in its mere external forms”).

In the second phase, the prisoner felt no sympathy for his fellow prisoners, in this context the Author says this,

“But the prisoner who had passed into the second stage of his psychological reactions did not avert his eyes anymore [to the torture and sufferings around him]. By then his feelings were blunted, and he watched unmoved…[citing an example],,He stood unmoved while a 12 year old boy was carried in who had been forced to standout attention for hours in the snow or to work outside with bare feet because there were no shoes for him in the camp. His toes had become frostbitten, and the doctor on duty picked off the black gangrenous stumps with tweezers, one by one…Disgust, horror and pity are emotions that our spectator could not really feel any more. “

When a fellow prisoner died due to typhus, or starvation,

“One by one the prisoners approached the still warm body. One grabbed the remains of a messy meal of potatoes’ another decided that the corpse’s wooden shoes were an improvement on his own, and exchanged them. A third man did the same with the dead man’s coat, and another was glad to be able to secure some-just imagine!-genuine string.”

Regarding the behavior of the camp guards,

“That guard did not think it worth his while to say anything, not even a swear word, to the ragged, emaciated figure standing before him, which probably reminded him only vaguely of a human form. Instead, he playfully picked up a stone and threw it at me. That, to me, seemed the way to attract the attention of a beast, to call a domestic animal back to its job, a creature with which you have so little in common that you do not even punish it. “

For me, that took a while to sink in. Now, prepare for the next one.

“I shall never forget how I roused one night by the groans of a fellow prisoners, who threw himself about in his sleep, obviously having a horrible nightmare. Since I had always been especially sorry for people who suffered from fearful dreams or delirium, I wanted to wake the poor man. Suddenly, I drew back the hand which was ready to shake him, frightened at the thing I was about to do. At the moment I became intensely conscious of the fact that no dream, no matter how horrible, could be as bad as the reality of the camp which surrounded us, and to which I was about to recall him. “

Let that sink in.

The camp life also pushed the mind to give life to unavoidable and uncontrollable thoughts of food. Regarding this,

“Perhaps it can be understood, then, that even the strongest of us was longing for the time when he would have fairly good food again, not for the sake of good food itself, but for the sake of knowing that the sub-human existence, which had made us unable to think of anything other than food, would at last cease. “

Regarding hope, and religious interest to fan hope,

“Many times, hopes for a speedy end to the war, which had been fanned by optimistic rumors, were disappointed. Some men lost all hope, but it was the incorrigible optimists who were the most irritating companions…The religious interest of the prisoners, as far and as soon as it developed, was the most sincere imaginable. The depth and vigor of religious belief often surprised and moved a new arrival.”

At this point in the book, the author makes a very insightful observation,

“In spite of all the enforced physical and mental primitiveness of the life in a concentration camp, it was possible for spiritual life to deepen. Sensitive people who were used to a rich intellectual life maybe 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 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 did those of a robust nature. “

Through this, he lays in firm words wisdom that is timeless,

“…for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into songs 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 beliefs 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….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.”

---

The entire episode is available for you to listen for free on my Spotify Podcast!

---

“This intensification of inner life helped the prisoner find a refuge from the emptiness, desolation and spiritual poverty of his existence.”

An interesting observation about nature and art,

“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 someones had seen our faces on the journey from Auschwitz to a Bavarian camp as we beheld the mountains of Slazburg 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.”

One evening when they were standing outside and watching the beautiful sunset, with the “desolate great mud huts provided a sharp contrast, while the puddles on the muddy ground reflected the glowing sky”, one prisoner says,

“How beautiful the world could be!”

Victor Frankl says at this point that he heard his wife’s voice in hushed, as clearly as he could hear the sounds around him, and amongst other things she tells, she tells him an important thing,

“I heard a victorious ‘Yes’ in answer to my question of the existence of an ultimate purpose.”

He recounts his second night at Auschwitz,

“I shall never forget how I awoke from deep sleep of exhaustion on my second night in Auschwitz-roused by music. The senior warden of the hut had some kind of celebration in his room, which was near the entrance of the hut. Tipsy voices bawled some hackneyed tunes. Suddenly there was a silence and into the night a violin sang a desperately sad tango, an unusual tune not spoiled by frequent playing. The violin wept and a part of me wept with it, for on at same day someone had a  twenty-fourth birthday. That someone lay in another part of Auschwitz camp, possibly only a few hundred or a thousand yards away, and yet some-lately out of reach. That someone was my wife.”

And now the famous observation about man’s suffering,

“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. To draw an analogy ; a man’s suffering is similar to the behavior of gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the ‘size’ of human suffering is absolutely relative.”

A few weeks later, cannibalism broke out in the camp. Victor leaves for Auschwitz just in time. He recounts the story Death in Teheran.

“A rich and mighty Persian once walked in his garden with one of his servants. The servants cried that he had just encountered Death. who had threatened him. He begged his master to give him his fastest horse so that he could make haste and flee to Teheran, which he could reach that same evening. The master consented and the servant galloped off on the horse. On returning to his house the master himself met Death, and questioned him, ‘Why did you terrify and threaten my servant?’ ‘I did not threaten him;I only showed surprise in still finding him here when I planned to meet him tonight in Teheran’, said Death.”

Regarding the degradation of self-confidence,

“Without consciously thinking about it, the average prisoner felt himself utterly degraded. This became obvious when one observed thee contrast offered by the singular sociological structure of the camp. The more ‘prominent’ prisoners, the Capos, the cooks, the store-keepers and the camp policemen, did not, as a rule, feel degraded at all, like the majority of prisoners, but on the contrary-promoted! Some even developed miniature delusions of grandeur. The mental reaction of the envious and grumbling majority toward this favored minority found expressions in several ways, sometimes in jokes. For instance, I heard on prisoner talk to another about a Capo saying, ‘Imagine! I knew that man when he was only the president of a large bank. Isn’t it fortunate that he has risen so fat in the world?'”

Regarding thoughts of sex and sexual desires, Victor Frankl explains that it was nonexistent. Regarding violence, he says,

“Since the prisoner continually witnessed scenes of beatings, the impulse toward violence was increased.”

Now, the all important questions – Does man have no choice of action in the face of such circumstances [life in concentration camps] ?

And Victor Frankl’s answer stands out like a single bright yellow flower in a field full of grey ash. The next time you feel ‘bored’ with and about life, here is what he has to say, watch, read and observe, here is what the holocaust survivor has to say.

“We can answer these questions from experience as well as on principle. The experience of camp life show that man does have a choice of action. There were enough examples, often of a heroic acts, which proved that apathy could be overcome, irritability supressed. Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress.

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have beeb few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms-to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

And there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become the plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become molded into the from of the typical inmate. “

Therefore,

“..in the final analysis it becomes clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influenced alone.”

He recounts Dostoevski’s famous saying, “There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.” And consequently he adds lines which, according to me, is the single biggest reason to read the book. I decided then, and there, that I would strive from that moment and forward to be worthy of my what little suffering.

“…I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behavior in camp, whose suffering and death, bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom cannot be lost. It can be said that they were worthy of their sufferings; the way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement. It is this spiritual freedom-which cannot be taken away-that makes life meaningful and purposeful.”

He adds,

“An active life serves the purpose of giving man the opportunity to realize values in creative work, while a passive life of enjoyment affords him the opportunity to obtain fulfillment in experiencing beauty, art or nature.”

“If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering…The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample oppurtunity-even under the most difficult circumstances-to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal. Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attainting the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not“

Important to note,

“It is true that only a few people are capable of reaching such high moral standards. Of the prisoners only a few kept their full inner liberty and obtained those values which their sufferings afforded, but even one such example is sufficient proof that man’s inner strength may raise him above his outward fate. Such men are not only in concentration camps. Everywhere man is confronted with fate. with the chance of achieving something through his own sufferings.”

---

The entire episode is available for you to listen for free on my Spotify Podcast!

---

Regarding the distorted feeling of time,

“The Latin word finis has two meanings: the end or the finish, and a goal to reach. A man who could not see the end of his existence [provisional existence of the camp life] was not able to aim at an ultimate goal in life. He ceased living for the future, in contrast to a man in normal life. Therefore the whole structure of his inner life changed; signs of decay set in which we know from other areas in life. The unemployed worker, for example, is in a similar position. His existence has become provisional and in a certain sense he cannot live for the future or aim at a goal. Research work done on unemployed miners has shown that they suffer from a peculiar sort of deformed time-inner time-which is a result of their unemployed states.”

And what does such a man do with his time?

“A man who let himself decline because he could not see any further goal found himself occupied with retrospective thoughts. In a different connection, we have already spoken of the tendency there was to look into the past [thinking about loved ones and favorite food], to help make the present, with all its horrors, less real. But in robbing the present of its reality there lay a certain danger. It became easy to overlook the opportunities to make something positive of camp life.”

And he adds something which we can all, at some point and level, relate to and is useful to avoid,

“Such people forgot that often it is just such an exceptionally difficult external situation which gives man the opportunity to grow spiritually beyond himself. Instead ofd taking the camp’s difficulties as a test of their inner strength, they did not take their life seriously and despised it as something of no consequence. They preferred to close their eyes and to liver in the past. Life for such people became meaningless.“

How do we cope with struggle and how do we discipline our emotions?

“…Emotions, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.”

Victor Frankl rightly brings to our attention Nietzsche’s words at this point,
“He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.” After reading that, I knew where I had to concentrate. Find the why to live.

A heavy hitting paragraph comes our way at this point in the book. This is regarding the actual ‘meaning of life’. His answer is thought provoking as always,

“It did not 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.”

“…He will have to acknowledge the fact the even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relive him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way which he bears his burden.”

Victor Frankl says, that the greatest courage of man is the courage to suffer.

And then, just when the night seemed to forever continue, and the hope of freedom was all lost, the war came to an end. The Allies had breached the front lines and were thundering into the heartlands of Nazi Germany. And very soon, the camps were liberated. Victor Frankl was free at last. And he notices something interesting amongst the now freed men. This observation, according to me, really stings.

“…so the man who has suddenly been liberated from mental pressure can suffer damage to his moral and spiritual health. During this psychological phase one observed that people with natures of a more primitive kind could not escape the influence of the brutality which had surrounded them in camp life. Now, being free, they thought they could use their freedom licentiously and ruthlessly. The only thing that had changed for them was that they were now the oppressors instead of the oppressed. They became instigators, not objects, of willful force and injustice. They justified their behavior by their own terrible experience.…only slowly could these men be guided back to the commonplace truth that no one has the right to do wrong, not even if wrong has been done to them. “

The men who were free at last had to come to this painful realization once they slowly assimilated into regular society and went back into normal families,

“…A man who for years had thought he had reached the absolute limit of all possible suffering now found that suffering has no limits, and that he could suffer still more, and still more intensely.”

And he ends the account with this message,

“But 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.

The crowning 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 his God.”

---

The entire episode is available for you to listen for free on my Spotify Podcast!

---

The end. Hope you liked it 🙂

There is no substitute to actually reading this book, it is a sombre but life-changing experience.

You can find the book here.