January 27, 2025
“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
– Viktor E. Frankl
Viktor Frankl was a survivor of the Holocaust and an Austrian psychiatrist who published 39 books in his lifetime, including the international best-seller “Man’s Search for Meaning,” which was based on his experiences in Nazi concentration camps. He founded a school of psychotherapy called “Logotherapy,” which posits that the “central human motivational force in life” is our search for meaning.
He was well-acquainted with suffering in his personal life and his practice.
His biography by the Viktor E. Frankl Institute says, “Frankl spent a total of three years in four camps: Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Kaufering III, and Türkheim. He lost his father in the Terezín Ghetto, his brother and mother at Auschwitz, and his wife in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. His sister, Stella, escaped to Australia. He was devastated when he returned to Vienna and found nothing left of the life he once knew and the people he loved.”
He concluded that suffering can either lead us to God or despair and hopelessness. During his years in Auschwitz, he observed that loss of hope was what led many people to die.They believed they no longer had a reason to live and had no future. Losing their spiritual bearings, they began to decline physically and emotionally. And the decline could be quite sudden.
“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread,” he wrote. “They may have been few in number, 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.”
He made another observation that applies to those who are grieving the loss of a loved one: “There was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer.”
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