Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

    I really liked this book, which has been recommended to me for years, and I'm happy I read it when I did after reading a couple yizkor books, in order to really appreciate it as a yizkor book in its first half, in which Frankl describes his experience in the Holocaust. I was amazed to learn that he wrote the portion about his Holocaust in just nine days in 1945. It is so interesting to have such a great thinker also be a Holocaust survivor, and makes me think how many other great thinkers were murdered in the Holocaust, and left manuscripts unpublished. Like so many others, Frankl feels that his life was decided by forces greater than him. He describes an opportunity to escape, to leave Austria before the Holocaust began, but that he was stuck in a dilemma, unsure whether he should leave, or stay to take care of his elderly parents. He was looking for a sign. He writes:

It was then that I noticed a piece of marble laying on a table at home. When I asked my father about it, he explained that he had found it on the site where the National Socialists had burned down the largest Viennese synagogue. He had taken the piece home because it was part of the tablets on which the Ten Commandments were inscribed. One gilded Hebrew letter was engraved on the piece; my father explained that this letter stood for one of the Commandments. Eagerly I asked, "Which one is it?" He answered, "Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days be long upon the land." At that moment I decided to stay with my father and my mother upon the land, and to let the American visa lapse.

    Frankl's book is most interesting because he can address the behaviors of Holocaust victims and survivors from a trained psychological perspective. One interesting aspect was humor: he describes entering showers with several other men, and them joking that at least it was water coming out of the sprays instead of gas. Another was curiosity: at some points, he didn't fear death as much as he was just curious whether he would live or die. Another time, as prisoners were shipped in an overpacked cattle car from Auschwitz through Bavaria, they marveled at the beauty of the mountains they could see through holes and slats in the wooden walls. In camp, they observed beautiful sunrises in th midst of their slavery and torture.

    One thing that I think was horrible for survivors was the trauma of dreaming about the Holocaust for the rest of their lives, and how painful it would be to relive that memory. But something less obvious is how painful dreaming would be for those same people as they lived through the Holocaust, since waking up was worse than any nightmare! Frankl describes that, as one time he observed a man writhing around, obviously having a nightmare. But he decided not to wake him, since whatever the nightmare was in the man's sleep would be better than their waking nightmare. 

    Frankl comes away with several short life lessons that I'll list here:

• The salvation of man is through love and in love.
• From Nietzsche: That which does not kill me, makes me stronger.
• A man's concern, even his despair, over the worthlessness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease. 
• 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 the being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips. 
• Live as if you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now.
• Also Nietzsche: He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

There is also an additional chapter in which Frankl discusses the tragic triad of (1) pain, (2) guilt, and (3) death. How can one embrace life in spite of those three things? He calls it "tragic optimism," which is: (1) turning suffering into a human achievement and accomplishment; (2) deriving from guilt the opportunity to change oneself for the better; and (3) deriving from life's transitoriness an incentive to take responsible action.

    Frankl is just a strong believer that, for most people, mental health is shaped by circumstances and how we react to circumstances. No one can take away a man's source of meaning. But no one can give him one either. Every person has to figure it out for themselves, and he observed, in the camps, people who gave up on life and died shortly after. His book is a classic because suffering is classic, and Frankl shows his readers how to find meaning in suffering.