Featured painting: Human Laundry, Belsen: April 1945This is probably my first book I read out of some personal inner interests, which were itching me a bit too much. I read the book twice, to understand and it still feels like I understood it only partly. Such depth of experience, death, trauma, tormentation, and like putting the human mind in a furnace and then seeing if it survives? And it does survive! Some moulded to knives, some moulded to daggers but some also moulded to armours for others and that one hope and that one utility of human life which can make it worth living for us, is what I went on to read the book for. ❤ It is a sad yet motivational read. It will not give 2 minute motivation instead it will expand your mental depth in both the directions – depth of experience of what a man can go through and height of self belief that no matter what, I shall continue on the path of righteousness inherently embedded in the spirit of human heart!
The book is divided in the following sections:
| S.NO | Chapter Name: | Chapter content: |
| 1. | Preface | This contains the interesting and famous question “Why do you not commit suicide?” that Victor Frankle used to ask his patients to make them realise the meaning of their life. It gives a brief background about author and what the book contains. |
| 2. | Experiences at Concentration Camp | Well as the name suggests, it is about the experiences of the author as well as his inmates in the camp and how their psyche and morals were playing an important role in their survival. It also showcases the experience of FATE everyone in the camp felt strongly influenced by. It talks about how someone would develop certain behavioural patterns of mental acceptance of death before dying physically. Very gruesome at some points but equally inspiring to strive for the life ! |
| Next Blog will contain: | ||
| 3. | Logotherapy in a nutshell | Logo means meaning. So the therapy which provides meaning to you to live for, is logotherapy. It showcases several case studies of Victor’s patients who got immense relief and sometimes even immediately forever, when he applied his approach on them. |
| 4. | The case for a Tragic Optimism | It deals with the situation when a human finds himself in tragic triad – pain/guilt/death, and provides them an approach to strive for glory even when entire life seems to declare itself a tragedy. |
Preface 1 and 2
The preface gives insights about the author, which I think are really important to understand the book, so do not skip it. Frankl kept himself alive by thinking of his wife and the prospect of seeing her again, by dreaming of giving virtuous lectures again. Life is not just a quest for pleasure as Sigmund Freud would boil it down to, but a quest for higher meaning. He mentions that such meaning can be found in three places – in love – by living for someone else, in work – by doing something significant in their field, and in courage in difficult times. We give meaning to suffering by choosing the way we respond to it. This choice is actualization of the fundamental freedom no one ever can take away from us. (A glimpse of Stoic approach I personally found in this.) The book insists that life is meaningful despite our circumstances or lack of vision.
Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered tose gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.
Harold S Kushner
Some quotes from 1962 preface:
Dont aim at success — the more you aim at it and make it a target thae more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness cannot be pursued, it must ensure and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.
Victor Frankl (This reminded me of APJ, he used to speak very similar things.)
I therefore felt responsible for writing down what I had gone through, for I thought it might be helpful to people who are prone to despair.
Victor Frankl – prisoner number 119,104. People were merely a number for them.
Part one: Experiences in a Concentration Camp
So the story is about all the suffering, and killings and prolonged suffering mental state of the prisoners in the concentration camps in Auschwitz.
Note:
SS refers to Schutzstaffel, the Nazi paramilitary force.
Capo: prisoners who acted as trustees, having special privileges.
I will quote a lot from the book, I really wanted to avoid and paraphrase it into shorter versions, but that would take away the forceful impact it is meant to make on you. Anything in italics is a quote.
On average, only those prisoners could keep alive who, after years of trekking from camp to camp had lost all scruples in their fight for existence were prepared to use every means, honest and otherwise, even brutal force, theft and betrayal of friends, in order to save themselves We who have come back, by the aid of many lucky chances or miracles- whatever one may choose to call them – we know: the best of us did not return.
The people went through so much, the ones who survived would say:
We dislike talking about our experiences. No explanations are needed for those who have been inside, and the others will understand neither how we felt nor how we feel now.
The prisoners used to go through 3 phases according to Frankl, the admission, the period when he is well entrenched in the routine, and the period following his release.
First Phase: Shock of admission
The absolute groundbreaking shock also parallels what the author calls – delusion of reprieve – the condemned man, immediately before his execution, gets the illusion that he might be reprieved at the very last minute. Clinging to the feeble last hope… until it shatters.
1500 people stuffed in a hall with a capacity of 200 at most. There was no space for everyone to even squat, let alone lie down. They were given five-ounce bread pieces once in 4 days as food. As long as some people initially had some belongings with them, they would trade it for Schnaps – liquor, to escape temporarily from the horror. The Capos were special prisoners appointed to handle the mass crematoriums and gas chambers, but they also shared the same fate after a period of time.
The 1500 people who reached their stuffed-in train carriages, were made to form queues, and an SS personnel would point them to the left or right, with a very sinister meaning. Right – work [send to special camp] Left – immediate execution to crematorium or gas chambers. The SS men were nice to prisoners as long as they saw some luxury they could exchange for providing basic necessities to the prisoners like – a piece of bread.
Naked Existence: Naive prisoners still hoped that maybe SS would not take away their wedding ring until they grasped the fact that even their clothes would not be left. As the queue moves to a hallway, they are ordered to strip down, and can only take their shoes(the good ones would be exchanged though for bad ones), belt or suspenders and possibly a truss with them. Soon there were leather whips on naked bodies. The heads were shorn, not a single hair was left on their entire body before admission to the camp and they were strictly advised to shave every day if they would like to live another day. All we possessed was, literally, our naked existence. They were made to sleep on a 6×8.5ft bed. No not for one, but for 9 men to sleep in that space. Someone’s dislocated arm was a pillow for someone else. The author quotes Dostoevski: Yes a man can get used to anything, but do not ask us how.
Sense of humour and curiosity? All the illusions they had maybe the SS or Capos won’t go worse than this, were broken. Most of them overcame with a grim sense of humour. And immense curiosity seemed to itch them whenever they were in the situation of life and death, the curiosity to know if they would be alive or just another fractured skull? These two approaches were somehow a means of protection from the gruesome surroundings shouting in each of their sense organs.
Run into the wire? No! : The thought of suicide was entertained by everyone. It was born of the hopelessness of the situation and the constant looming death over the prisoners. The most common method of suicide was to touch the electrically charged barbed wire fence- run into the wire. The author says he had strongly decided on the first evening of camp that he would not ever do that. All that was needed to be done to avoid Gas Chambers was to just look fit enough for the labour work and you will be saved from death, with the alternative of immense prolonged suffering.
Second Phase: Apathy or Emotional Death
The onset of this phase is extreme longing for home and disgust due to everything that is happening around them. For example, the prisoner who would be appointed to clean the toilets – if … some excrement splashed on the face, any sign of disgust by the prisoner or an attempt to wipe off the filth would be punished with a blow from a Capo. And thus mortification of normal reactions was hastened.
Soon the normalisation of all the atrocities made the prisoners unable to feel -disgust or horror or pity. None felt that.
Dead prisoner or new shoes? People would gather around the dead bodies of their friends or any prisoner to see if they can exchange their boots with it’s to protect their feet from frostbite or the coat of a deadman. They were also responsible to drag the corpse to the cremation grounds, with the uncanny rattling of the skull on stairs, floor etc because no one even had the strength to move with respect on their own let alone with a corpse. This uncanny horror meant nothing to them, a total lack of emotion. One can call this mental strength as well.
Indignation and justification of suffering? A very painful paragraph which shows indignation, I would like to quote:
At such a moment it is not the physical pain which hurts the most, it is the mental agony caused by injustice, the unreasonableness of it all. Strangely enough, a blpw which does not even find its mark can, under some circumstances, hurt more than one that finds its mark.
The author recalls when he was straightening his back for a moment when a Capo threw a stone at him, he says- 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.
The constant torture, and scarcity of the basic necessities forced the prisoner’s mental state to a primitive lifestyle- “regression”. His wishes and desires became obvious to him in his dreams. When he found his inmate having a terrible nightmare, Victor thought to wake him up but he did not, because he realised, no matter how horrible the dream may be, it could be only as bad as the reality of the camp in which they lived. Each of the inmates would often find themselves calculating the time of other inmates they are left with to live.
Nutrition what? The scarcity of food can be understood by the fact that the prisoners would sometimes keep a piece of bread only to touch it and gain some reassurance that they have something to eat if it comes to starvation or death. One group used to eat everything immediately, and the other would save it for the evening.
Where did Lust go? It was absent. Never. For each prisoner, frustration and higher feelings were the only feelings which found expression in him and in his dreams. The sole focus was to survive. The months passed quicker than days, for they were focused on surviving just one more day, and never realised it has been months or even years.
When the author was being transferred to another camp, through a small hole in the carriage, the prisoners were trying to figure out where they are headed to. Then came the city of Vienna, which the author wanted to see because it was my home town. He requested others to let him take a look at his home town, to which the reply was –“You lived here all those years? Well, then you have seen quite enough already!”.
Eerie and weird human behaviour in the camp:
In the new camp, some had lost all hope, but it was the incorrigible optimists who were the most irritating companions. People also suffered from delirium apart from diseases like typhus, frostbite, fever, edema, chilblains etc.
Delirium: a mental state in which you are confused, disoriented, and not able to think or remember clearly. The author would often compose speeches in his mind to help people overcome it or to just stay awake the entire night to avoid panic delirium attacks.
Spiritualistic seance: There were many groups in the camp, including capos and SS guards who would gather at night and draw some charts and practise weird rituals, which Victor also was asked to join, but all he could observe was a psychological trace to some memories of the prisoners and nothing else.
Craving for art: Often a cabaret was organised in the cells, where people would recite poems, cry a little, jokes, songs of satire about the camp etc, which people used to attend, even if it meant missing their daily portion of food in the evening in the new camp.
One another favourite quote from the book –
Sensitive people who were used to a rich intellectural life may have sufffered much pain, but the damage to their innner 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 did those of robust nature.
When the author was going through a tough draining physical labour, he started remembering his wife, and understood the meaning of – 1. The salvation of man is through love and in love. 2. The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite-glory. Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds out the deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. He found meaning in his suffering by remembering his wife. Later, he got the chance to volunteer in the medical team to help treat the patients. The method of treatment was to give no medicine to the terminally-ill patients, because it would deprive the ones who stand a chance to survive of the medicines.
Everything was sacrificed, all the values that a man holds on to, dignity, morals, kindness, justice, sense of righteousness, everything was sacrificed because the value of life was nullified. The man had maybe his self-respect but had to give up even that too in order to just keep himself alive. The mental state of each inmate was such that they were scared to make any decision, because they did not want to disturb the course of fate and commit a mistake only to die. When author left for another concentration camp, he found himself lucky, because the previous camp suffered a severe scarcity of food. When a camp policeman confiscated a pot while he was searching for body part of a corpse, and found human flesh boiling in it. Cannibalism had broken out. After some weeks, when there was evacuation and medical supplies to the camp from the RedCross society, some prisoners were exchanged for PoW and some camps were simply burnt with people locked in them alive.
A very powerful paragraph from the book.
But what about human liberty? Is there no spiritual surroundings? Is that theory true which would have us believe that man is no more than a product of may conditions and environmental factors – be they of a biological psychological or sociological nature? Is man but an accidental product of these? Most important, do the prisoners reaction to the singular world of the concentration camp prove that an cannot escape the influences of his surroundings? Does man have no choice of action in the face of such circumstances? We who lived in
Soon the author finds an answer to this quest in the book and says –
We who lived in the concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few 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…… Fundamentally therefore, any man can even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him – mentally and spiritually. And then he quotes Dostoevsky: ” There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.” …..
A man who could not see the end of his provisional existence was not able to aim at an ultimate goal in life. Based on this thought, author said visualization of a good life helped him cope up even the most excruciating pain. He would imagine himself giving lecture on a platform in a pleasant lecture room to an attentive audience. He quotes: “All that oppressed me at that moment became objective, seen and described from the remote viewpoint of science.…. Emotion which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.”
The prisoners who lost faith in future and believed there is nothing left, they had nothing left, and they simply refused to live anymore, eventually they died. This was testified by a strangely evident example. Mr F the senior block Warden of author’s prison cell, said that he had a dream and that in the dream a voice told him that March 30th, he would gain his freedom from these sufferings of camp, and the war would be over. On March 29th F became suddenly ill, and ran a high temperature. He was delirious and lost consciousness soon. On March 30th, he died. To all outward appearances he had died of typhus, but for real he died of something else. There is a connection between the state of mind of a man – courage and hope or the lack of them, affects our immunity. The voice of his dream was true after all, he did gain freedom from all his suffering. A naïve hope that by next Christmas the prisoners believed to be home, but the number of deaths clinging to this hope only increased near the Christmas week.
Meaning of Life?
A change in attitude was recommended –
It did not really 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 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 the right action and in the 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.
Sometimes the situations we are in, require us to shape our own fate by action and other times we might just have to bear the cross. For men more evidently, the uniqueness and irreplaceability which distinguishes the individual and gives meaning to his existence has power to bring meaning to him and go beyond imaginable paths to live, to suffer. he who has a why for his existence, will bear almost any how.
Having been is also a kind of being, and perhaps the surest kind. The elder people have the treasure of having been. The young have the treasure of acting on their visualization. And both of these are enough to bring meaning to them, it is just a matter of finding it and holding on to it.
Third Phase: Liberation
By this time, most prisoners had learnt that there are two races only. The race of decent man and indecent man. . The life in concentration camp exposed the depth of human soul and conscience. The rift dividing the good and bad reaches into the lowest depths and becomes apparent even on the bottom of the abyss, and very clearly visible.
Although the perception of role also influenced the understanding of good and bad boundary. For example an inmate abusing another inmate was seen as an extremely bad while the same being done by capo was not as much criticized. A capo showing bare minimum kindness was appreciated a lot more than what a fellow would. In the end it boiled down to acceptance of the kind people and holding them in high regard.
On their liberation, freedom. The reality did not perpetuate their consciousness, the word freedom, the feeling of pleasant had lost its meaning. Depersonalization appeared, unreal, dreamy, falseness in the truth of it all. Nothing appeared real, and once it did…. it was unbelievable still.
A friend of the author talked and talked endlessly, he had to talk, it was a compulsion for him. Some were so keen to eat good food, they ate ravenously even at midnight. But it took time for things other than basic needs to take over, to realize what is being tied, needs to be untied now. The realization of being free and having an ocean of life ahead.
But…. for some, the acute mental tension had deprived them of normal functioning of ethics and being in the society. It had to be imputed in their conscience again, that no matter how much has been done to you, you are not allowed to do wrong to others.
For some, they found that no one awaited them. Woe to him who found that the person whose memory alone had given him courage, in the camp, did not exist anymore. “There was absolutely no earthly happiness which could compensate for all that we suffered.” There was nothing to fear anymore, except his God.
It felt incomplete, sorry-ful and injustice. But that is the reality. I can not change the course of history to make it pleasant in the end. It has to be swallowed and accepted.
The next blog is going to be interesting, it will contain insights about Victor Frankl’s method of providing psychological support and another interesting read. So please keep an eye on your email inbox for the next blog, I promise that it will be soon.
So…
That was it my dear readers, I really appreciate your efforts to read whatever I wrote. Congratulations ! You just read 3900+ words and I hope that you gained some beautiful insights from this post.
Indeed it is a thought-book, this is all what I think whenever I am… existing.
Feel free to drop a message or follow me for no reason(?) at my Instagram. I would love to know if you felt connected or what sorts of thought you have. Also, you can help me by letting me know the topics you want to read more about.
I would love to receive your reviews and criticism in an ordered way so that I can improve accordingly.
DO WRITE TO ME BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE !( 
)
@Thought._.Book 
Leave a comment