MAN’S SEARCH, PART II. . .

Viktor Frankl stepped from the train. He noticed that almost everyone was turning and walking to their left. He began to turn. A German Officer stepped in front of him. He gazed into his eyes, put his hands on Viktor’s shoulders; he then turned Viktor to the right and thus began Viktor’s journey into the darkness that was Auschwitz. Prior to arriving at the dormitory he was searched. All of his valuables were taken from him. He also carried with him his notebook which contained a manuscript. He tried to explain its importance to the soldiers; they ignored his pleas and the notebook was taken away. Viktor sought support by trying to explain to a fellow prisoner his plight. The prisoner sneered out a grin and said, ‘Shit!’ “At that moment I saw the plain truth and did what marked the culminating point of the first phase of my psychological reaction: I struck out my whole former life.”

How can he face his new ‘life’? This question was answered when Viktor was given a coat that a recently deceased man had worn. In the coat’s pocket Viktor found a small scrap of paper; it had been torn from a Hebrew prayer book. Still legible was the prayer ‘Shema Yisrael’: ‘Love thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.’ To Viktor it became “the command to say yes to life despite whatever one has to face, be it suffering or even dying.”

This single scrap of paper became more valuable than his lost manuscript. The prayer became a “symbolic call” to live the philosophy that he wrote about. He now had the opportunity to test in the living-hell called Auschwitz what he had proclaimed in writing. As he continued to empty himself he realized that he had “nothing to lose except his so ridiculously naked life.”

Viktor Frankl survived and emerged in 1945 from his living-hell. He re-entered the other world with a knowledge born of first-hand experience that we human beings have, in any and all situations, a choice over our actions. We are, if we so choose, able to preserve, even in the wasteland of life, a slice of spiritual freedom, a fragment of freedom. We humans can choose to embrace the most fundamental human freedom: the freedom to choose an attitude or way of responding to our ‘fate.’ We have the freedom to choose our own way.

Viktor believed that this piece of spiritual freedom cannot be taken from us; it gives our life meaning and purpose – without it, he discovered, there is no reason for surviving. When he wrote of his journey he quoted Nietzsche: ‘He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how.’

Consider, gentle reader, that Viktor Frankl was correct: What matters in human existence is not so much the fate that awaits us but the way in which we accept that fate. “To be alive is to suffer,” he wrote, and “to find some meaning in one’s suffering is to survive.” It is up to each of us to find what Viktor Frankl called the “will to meaning.”

In 1964 Viktor Frankl’s story helped me find meaning in my own inner wasteland – amidst my own dark night of the soul. Since then Viktor continues to travel with me and when needed he reminds me that I do, indeed, have the freedom to choose to say ‘yes’ to life no matter what.