Man's Search for Meaning

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of antisemitism and graphic descriptions of the Holocaust and concentration camps.

Frankl begins his personal narrative when he is traveling to Auschwitz by train. He was transported with 1,500 people, with 80 people in each car. They could see enough to notice the sign for Auschwitz, which was already known as a death camp. This is when Frankl and the others felt what he labels the initial state of “shock” that characterizes every prisoner’s experience.

Upon arriving at the camp, the important moment came when Frankl faced the first selection, which he had no way of understanding. An SS officer reviewed the prisoners as they filed up to him and he pointed them either to his left or to his right.  Frankl was pointed to the right. Only later did he learn that those who went to the left were killed immediately in the gas chambers and that only about 10% of the new prisoners survived to be kept on as slave laborers.

“I inquired from prisoners who had been there for some time where my colleague and friend P----- had been sent. ‘Was he sent to the left side?’ ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘Then you can see him there,’ I was told. ‘Where?’ A hand pointed to the chimney a few hundred yards off, which was sending a column of flame up into the grey sky of Poland. It dissolved into a sinister cloud of smoke. ‘That’s where your friend is, floating up to Heaven,’ was the answer. But I still did not understand until the truth was explained to me in plain words” (13).

Next came the processing of the prisoner workers, in which they were stripped of their belongings, their clothes, and all of the hair on their bodies through shaving. This was the beginning of the Nazis’ attempts to dehumanize their charges and to foster fear and obedience in them.

Frankl and the others received important advice from veteran prisoners on how to survive. They told Frankl that, “If you want to stay alive there is only one way: look fit for work. Even if you 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 [...] Therefore, remember: shave, stand and walk smartly; then you need not be afraid of the gas” (19).

Frankl describes the second stage of psychological reaction that the prisoners went into after the initial shock. It was a full shutdown of emotions. As an example, he tells us that “[h]e stood unmoved while a twelve-year-old-boy was carried in [...] 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 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” (21-22).

Frankl notes that this lack of emotional response was particularly evident during the continuous beatings that the prisoners experienced or witnessed.

Later, Frankl offers his first experience of good fortune in the camp. Capos were prisoners who supervised their fellow prisoners. They were chosen for their toughness and brutal behaviors: they were often more violent than the guards in order to impress their captors and earn privileges. But Frankl managed to befriend his Capo so that the Capo looked out for him. This was important to his survival: "Fortunately, the Capo in my working party was obligated to me; he had taken a liking to me because I listened to his love stories and matrimonial troubles, which he poured out during our long marches to our work site. I had made an impression on him with my diagnosis of his character and with my psychotherapeutic advice. After that he was grateful, and this had already been of value to me [...] As an additional payment for my services, I could be sure that as long as soup was being dealt out at lunchtime at our work site, he would, when my turn came up, dip the ladle right to the bottom of the vat and fish out a few peas" (26-27). For a prisoner on a starvation diet, such favors made an enormous difference.

Frankl describes the inevitable effects of malnutrition on the body, which begins to eat itself, and on the mind, which becomes obsessed with thoughts and fantasies about food. Frankl was concerned that his fellow prisoners spent so much time and energy imagining food they wished they had or hoped to have at the end of the war. He felt it interfered with their ability to cope with the reality of starvation rations. Frankl asks, “Is it not wrong to provoke the organism with such detailed and affective pictures of delicacies when it has somehow managed to adapt itself to extremely small rations and low calories? Though it may afford momentary psychological relief, it is an illusion which psychologically, surely, must not be without danger” (30).

At this point in the author’s narrative, he notes that he was transferred from the camp at Auschwitz to one connected with the Dachau complex.  On the way, his train passed through Vienna and he saw the street where he had lived through a peephole in the train car.

Besides food, two of the main topics of conversation were politics and religion: “Politics were talked about everywhere in the camp, almost continuously; the discussions were based chiefly on rumors, which were snapped up and passed around avidly. The rumors about the military situation were mostly contradictory. They followed one another rapidly and only succeeded in making a contribution to the war of nerves that was waged in the minds of all the prisoners” (34).

Religion was also much discussed. Frankl notes that “The religious interest of the prisoners, as far and as soon as it developed, was the most sincere imaginable. The depth and rigor of religious belief often surprised and moved a new arrival. Most impressive in this connection were improvised prayers or services in the corner of a hut, or in the darkness of the locked cattle truck in which we were brought back from a distant work site, tired, hungry, and frozen in our ragged clothing” (34).

Around this time, Frankl had a spiritual awakening regarding the importance of love as a source of meaning in his life and in people’s lives more generally: “My mind still clung to the image of my wife. A thought crossed my mind: I didn’t know if she were still alive. I knew only one thing—which I have learned well by now: Love goes 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...had I known that my wife was dead, I think that I would still have given myself, undisturbed by that knowledge, to the contemplation of her image...” (38-39).

Besides images of loved ones, the prisoners also were helped by cultivating a sense of humor, in even the bleakest of circumstances. Frankl describes one incident that aroused general humor among the prisoners.  When their convoy train arrived at Dachau, he and the others learned that this work camp had “no ‘oven,’ no crematorium, no gas!” (45). They would not be killed there. He reflects, “This joyful; surprise put us all in a good mood. The wish of the senior warden in our hut in Auschwitz had come true: we had come, as quickly as possible, to a camp which did not have a ‘chimney’—unlike Auschwitz. We laughed and cracked jokes in spite of, and during, all we had to go through in the next few hours” (45).

Frankl was fortunate to be transferred to a rest camp to work as a doctor. At the time of the transfer, he had no way of knowing if the rest camp destination was a ruse and if he and his fellows would be killed immediately or in a shortly after they arrived. It turned out that Frankl did get to a rest camp, which helped him survive. Indeed, things deteriorated to such a low point in the camp he had left that “[c]annibalism had broken out. [he] had left just in time” (56).

Before he left Dachau, he felt the need to say good-bye to his friends and to “make his will” (55): “‘Listen, Otto, if I don’t get back home to my wife, and if you should see her again, then tell her that I talked of her daily, hourly. You remember. Secondly, I have loved her more than anyone. Thirdly, the short time I have been married to her outweighs everything, even all we have gone through here’” (55).

Towards the end of the war, when the frontline of battle got closer to the camp, Frankl had a chance to escape. However, he chose to stay with his patients rather than leave: “Suddenly I decided to take fate into my own hands for once. I ran out of the hut and told my friend that I could not go with him. As soon as I told him with finality that I had made up my mind to stay with my patients, the unhappy feeling left me. I did not know what the following days would bring, but I had gained an inward peace that I had never experienced before. I returned to the hut, sat down on the boards at my countryman’s feet and tried to comfort him; then I chatted with the others, trying to quiet them in their delirium” (58-59).

Frankl was profoundly lucky even on his final day at the camp, before liberation. Some of his fellow prisoners were given a ride out of the camp, but Frankl and another doctor were left behind. Frankl later learned that the men in the truck had been taken to another camp where they were locked in huts and burned to death.

The last third of Part I begins to outline the author’s conclusions, drawn from his concentration camp experiences. In this section, the author begins to describe his reinterpretation of the Viennese psychotherapy that originated with Sigmund Freud.  In Part II, Frankl focuses on the motivation provided by meaning in one’s life.

Frankl examines the psychological experience of being liberated from the camps. As he notes, the body was quick to adapt to the new freedoms, but the mind still had to adjust: “Psychologically, what was happening to the liberated prisoners could be called ‘depersonalization.’ Everything appeared unreal, unlikely, as in a dream. We could not believe it was true. How often in the past years had we been deceived by dreams! [...] And now the dream had come true. But could we truly believe it?” (88).

Frankl also observed intense feelings of anger and the desire for revenge among the liberated prisoners. In one instance, he and a friend were walking and encountered a “field of green crops.” Frankl wanted to go around the field so as not to damage the plants. His companion was moved by his grief and his hatred of destruction. I stammered something about not treading down the young crops. He became annoyed, gave me an angry look, and shouted, ‘You don’t say! And hasn’t enough been taken from us? My wife and child have been gassed—not to mention everything else—and you would forbid me to tread on a few stalks of oats?’” (90).

Frankl knew that the liberated prisoners would need help to reintegrate into a society that had caused them bitterness, disillusionment, and great loss. Very often, when the prisoners returned home they found no one left to meet them. He writes: “We were not hoping for happiness—it was not that that gave us courage and meaning to our suffering, our sacrifices and our dying. And yet we were not prepared for unhappiness. This disillusionment, which awaited not a small number of prisoners, was an experience which these men have found very hard to get over” (92). As a psychotherapist, Frankl saw this as a challenge to his professional practice.

Frankl finishes Part I with his definition of the essence of liberation, which he describes as freedom from fear: “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” (93).