Tags
Adolf Hitler, D-Day, Dachau, history, Holocaust, Holocaust Remembrance Day, hope, Human Dignity, Inspiration, Life, Man's Search for Meaning, Nicholson Baker, Robert Jay Lifton, Speeches, Third Reich, Viktor Frankl, World War Two
In the middle of Viktor Frankl’s tour de force chronicle of his survival of the Holocaust, Man’s Search for Meaning, there is a particular moment when existence at Dachau goes from dark to pitch black. It is the winter of 1944, several months after the D-Day invasions and thus the point in which Hitler’s Third Reich, sensing the writing on the wall, ratchets up the noxious gears of its Final Solution. The markers of this period are evoked by arresting phrases like Robert Jay Lifton’s “wild euthanasia” and Nicholson Baker’s “human smoke,” and can be seen crystalized in Schindler’s List, when an initially puzzled Liam Neeson sees ash fall from a clear sky as he wanders amidst children playing in a bourgeoisie town square.
For Frankl and his work group, these portents are worsened by the fact that they are being incrementally starved after refusing to identify a fellow prisoner suspected of stealing potatoes from a camp store house. Several days into this deprivation, the men have gone from emaciated to skeletal, as have their hopes for survival. As they lie on their dark bunks one evening, Frankl, only thirty-nine years old and one of the most respected men in the group, is asked by the barracks leader to give a speech.
The following is Frankl’s recollection of his words. It is one of the most beautiful and life-affirming speeches I’ve read, and one of several scenes I would have most wanted and hated to witness in the entire human drama of World War Two. Without fantasy or sentimentality, Frankl testifies to the force of life amidst terror and reaffirms the innate dignity of each human being in the face of whatever degradations he has suffered. I highly recommend a few moments of reading and reflection. The passage starts just as Frankl is called from his bunk:
__________
“God knows, I was not in the mood to give psychological explanations or to preach any sermons — to offer my comrades a kind of medical care of their souls. I was cold and hungry, irritable and tired, but I had to make the effort and use this unique opportunity. Encouragement was now more necessary than ever.
So I began by mentioning the most trivial of comforts first. I said that even in this Europe in the sixth winter of the Second World War, our situation was not the most terrible we could think of. I said that each of us had to ask himself what irreplaceable losses he had suffered up to then. I speculated that for most of them these losses had really been few. Whoever was still alive had reason for hope. Health, family, happiness, professional abilities, fortune, position in society — all these were things that could be achieved again or restored. After all, we still had all our bones intact. Whatever we had gone through could still be an asset to us in the future…
Then I spoke about the future. I said that to the impartial the future must seem hopeless. I agreed that each of us could guess for himself how small were his chances of survival. I told them that although there was still no typhus epidemic in the camp, I estimated my own chances at about one in twenty. But I also told them that, in spite of this, I had no intention of losing hope and giving up. For no man knew what the future would bring, much less the next hour. Even if we could not expect any sensational military events in the next few days, who knew better than we, with our experience of camps, how great chances sometimes opened up, quite suddenly, at least for the individual. For instance, one might be attached unexpectedly to a special group with exceptionally good working conditions—for this was the kind of thing which constituted the ‘luck’ of the prisoner.
But I did not only talk of the future and the veil which was drawn over it. I also mentioned the past; all its joys, and how its light shone even in the present darkness. Again I quoted a poet — to avoid sounding like a preacher myself — who had written, ‘Was Du erlebst, kann keine Macht der Welt Dir rauben.’ (What you have experienced, no power on earth can take from you.) Not only our experiences, but all we have done, whatever great thoughts we may have had, and all we have suffered, all this is not lost, though it is past; we have brought it into being. Having been is also a kind of being, and perhaps the surest kind.
Then I spoke of the many opportunities of giving life a meaning. I told my comrades (who lay motionless, although occasionally a sigh could be heard) that human life, under any circumstances, never ceases to have a meaning, and that this infinite meaning of life includes suffering and dying, privation and death. I asked the poor creatures who listened to me attentively in the darkness of the hut to face up to the seriousness of our position. They must not lose hope but should keep their courage in the certainty that the hopelessness of our struggle did not detract from its dignity and its meaning. I said that someone looks down on each of us in difficult hours — a friend, a wife, somebody alive or dead, or God — and he would not expect us to disappoint him. He would hope to find us suffering proudly — not miserably — knowing how to die.
And finally I spoke of our sacrifice, which had meaning in every case. It was in the nature of this sacrifice that it should appear to be pointless in the normal world, the world of material success. But in reality our sacrifice did have a meaning. Those of us who had any religious faith, I said frankly, could understand without difficulty. I told them of a comrade who on his arrival in camp had tried to make a pact with Heaven that his suffering and death should save the human being he loved from a painful end. For this man, suffering and death were meaningful; his was a sacrifice of the deepest significance. He did not want to die for nothing. None of us wanted that.
The purpose of my words was to find a full meaning in our life, then and there, in that hut and in that practically hopeless situation. I saw that my efforts had been successful. When the electric bulb flared up again, I saw the miserable figures of my friends limping toward me to thank me with tears in their eyes. But I have to confess here that only too rarely had I the inner strength to make contact with my companions in suffering and that I must have missed many opportunities for doing so.”
_____
From Viktor Frankl’s psychological chronicle of the Holocasust Man’s Search for Meaning.
Related reading:
- Cornel West’s testimony: “… Every person has a sanctity. Not just a dignity the way the Stoics talked about, but a sanctity: a value that has no price…”
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s moving “Who Am I?” letter from a German prison
- A section from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel speech, “A World Split Apart”
cindy knoke said:
Such a remarkable humanitarian.
john said:
What is it about the Holocaust that makes it so moving and heart rendering, even today, when most of the poor souls that survived it and most of the evil bastards that perpetrated it are dead? The sheer size of it? The proximity of it? The utter brutality of it? The proof of it that we have in the archives? The witness we have of it from the survivors and liberators? I was reading just recently that when Patton…old blood and guts himself…went for his first inspection of such a camp (and this was a work camp in western Germany, not an extermination camp in the East) with Eisenhower and Bradley, he had to go hide behind a building to throw up and that the experience haunted him for years thereafter.
I don’t know why it is, but in writing this I have an idea, or at least a hope that the reason why the Holocaust holds us so firmly in its grip is its majesty for proving the profound beauty of life, love and sacrifice. The survivors did more than survive; in the main they proved the transcendence of justice over utter evil. And in living, even after their enemies died, they responded to it with indignation, dignity and that sweetest of revenges, lives of meaning. Not lives of despair.
Sorry, this is not coming out as it should or as they deserve. But such a posting demands a response. As poor as it is, it’s mine.
jrbenjamin said:
I see your point. I really like that Eisenhower anecdote — had never heard it. Theordor Adorno said that there could be no poetry after Auschwitz. Dylan Thomas responded: “No, they need to send poets there.”
It’s indescribable and incomprehensible — that’s why I think resonates. At the time, Jews around Europe couldn’t absorb what was happening. They continually went along with the orders, believing they had reached some nadir of human cruelty; but always the floor fell from under them.
I have just started reading about the Soviet Gulag (Anne Applebaum’s ‘Gulag’ and Janusz Bardach’s ‘Man Is Wolf to Man’). The conditions in some of those camps seem to be roughly on par with some of the Nazi camps, but there were some qualitative differences. The main one I can identify is the absence of children: an integral part of the Holocaust’s horror is the ubiquity of the child — on the trains and in the camps. There is also the fact that, in the end, Concentration camps were about extermination, and Gulag was at least in principle about profit and suppression.
Anyways, to your point, there is that streak of humanity in the Holocaust. One thinks of the Jewish biologists who used their starvation to record observations about the human immune response, treating their lives as an experiment. They labeled the capsule in which they placed their buried study-results, “Not All of Us Will Die”. Such a powerful affirmation of the human desire to defy even the darkest odds.
A silver lining can be seen in the fact that survivors like Frankl would go on to do amazing things. In his case, he pioneered a branch of psychology and emigrated to the United States. A lot of stories like that, which we should be glad to bear witness, given the age of that generation.
As always, thanks for the insight.
jrbenjamin said:
I think the fact that children were there (and roughly one million of the six million total victims) is perhaps the most horrific part of the entire tragedy. The National Holocaust Museum in DC has several sections of exhibits dedicated to what children suffered.
dana mentink said:
Incredible and moving. Thank you for this post.
Tom Schultz said:
A testament to the resilience of the human spirit. Thanks for posting.
mlandersauthor said:
I think the horror and subsequent glimmer of beauty seen in the wake of the Holocaust comes from the humanity of the oppressed. The deepest goal of the Nazis was to take away any resemblance of humanity in the Jews. Of course killing them was a goal, but that could have been done quite more efficiently. The goal was to convince everyone that they weren’t worthy of human status.
I remember hearing a story of the attempts to help save those rescued from the camps. Many were so malnourished that no efforts of medical help could bring them back from the brink of death. Sending as many supplies as possible, the army somehow sent supplies of lipstick to a camp. I remember a doctor’s statement being one of shock in realizing that women dying of starvation were brought more peace from a tube of lipstick than any other attempt to help. Their humanity was being restores as they passed.
Alex Webster said:
love this speech it was one of my favorite parts of the book
Malissa said:
jrbenjamin.com has potential, you can make your blog go viral easily using one tricky method.
Just type in google:
Irsrod’s Method To Go Viral
Tahereh Barati said:
Reblogged this on taherehbarati and commented:
Giving meanings to every ordinary moment of life is the art of living of every ordinary man who makes extraordinary differences in life. Enjoy!
Pingback: Psychological Freedom: You Can Choose Your Attitude in Any Given Moment - RedTea News