Fred's Book Club: Hopelessness and Survival.

It's Wednesday once again, which means Hump Day, which means it's time for the Humpback Writers, our stupidly named book feature that looks at books. We often like to look at the lesser known works of famous writers, or more obscure writers and books, but today we have an author and book that are quite famous, and for very good reason. We're featuring them today because January 27 is the International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust, as decreed by the United Nations. And the book is Man's Search for Meaning, by Holocaust survivor Viktor E. Frankl. 

When you're in the publishing business you read an awful lot of books and articles on how to have a good life, but this is the only one I know of that was written by a man who spent three years in Nazi concentration camps. You're supposed to go to a spa in India and talk to a guru and then climb a mountain and stuff, right? Nope. There's a reason why those kinds of quests go many places but never get anywhere.

Dr. Frankl was a brilliant young psychiatrist when the Nazis rounded him up. In a very short time he lost family, career, and all the work he had done on a massive philosophical and psychological thesis. As for his friends:

It was the first selection, the first verdict made on our existence or non-existence. For the great majority of our transport, about 90 per cent, it meant death. Their sentence was carried out within the next few hours. Those who were sent to the left were marched from the station straight to the crematorium. This building, I was told by someone who worked there, had the word "bath" written over its doors in several European languages. On entering, each prisoner was handed a piece of soap, and then----but mercifully I do not need to describe the events which followed. Many accounts have been written about this horror. 
     We who were saved, the minority of our transport, found out the truth in the evening. 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.

Long before reading this book I'd read Leon Uris's Exodus, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and other books about the Holocaust and brutal prison (and death camp) conditions. The thing that is so amazing about Frankl's book, that still intrigues me, is that he combines his horrifying personal story with clinical observation, all of which will go to the making of the book's conclusion about purpose and human life.

Seeing himself and others as subjects, he looks at the phases of psychological change in the camps. The first phase is shock, shock at the terrible thing that has happened, with thoughts of escape by any means, even suicide. Eventually would come the second phase:

Apathy, the main symptom of the second phase, was a necessary mechanism for self-defense. Reality dimmed, and all efforts and all emotions were centered on one task: preserving one's own life and that of the other fellow.... It can be readily understood that such a state of strain, coupled with the constant necessity of concentrating on the task of staying alive, forced the prisoner's inner life down to a primitive level. 

Frankl would find himself numb to the suffering of others, suffering that would have caused a horrified reaction at any other time in his life.

With the inescapable presence of suffering and death and injustice, Frankl got to see what kind of men survived and what kind did not. The ones who were smoking their meager cigarette ration instead of trading cigarettes for food or clothes were ones who had given up. The ones who believed they would be free by Christmas would lose hope and die when the day came and went. ("The death rate in the week between Christmas, 1944, and New Year's, 1945, increased in camp beyond all previous experience" -- an observation later echoed by Commander James Stockdale.) Ultimately the survivors were ones who had found meaning in their lives, something that made the unendurable endurable:

A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the "why" for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any "how."

And how does a man find this meaning? That was the subject of the rest of the book, his other books, and his career.

All I can offer here is a brief overview of this book, which itself is not long -- my Washington Square Press paperback runs just 179 pages, not including the extensive bibliography. It is very readable, though in parts shocking even to those of us who have read other accounts of the Holocaust, and ultimately very sensible. 

Frankl, who died in 1997, hoped that his hard-won lessons might enlighten mankind to avoid anymore such genocides, and even prevent nuclear war. In that, he admitted he could be overoptimistic, but one can never say he and his work were without meaning. I recommend this book unconditionally to anyone.