My notes:
Frankl spent three years in Auschwitz during WWII. He’s a psychologist, and relates his observations of what it means to be human from the perspective of a concentration camp survivor.

Note: Frankl often uses “which” instead of “that”. Given the circumstances, who cares?
Page numbers from Pocket Books Edition, 1963.

45

“I shall never forget how I was roused one night be the groans of a fellow prisoner, who threw himself about in his sleep, obviously having a horrible nightmare. Since I had always been especially sorry for people who suffered from fearful dreams or delirium, I wanted to wake the poor man. Suddenly I drew back the hand which was read to shake him, frightened at the thing I was about to do. At the moment I became intensely conscious of the fact that no dream, no matter how horrible, could be as bad as the reality of the camp which surrounded us, and to which I was about to recall him.”

59

“I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world may still know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way - an honorable way - in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment.”

93 Frankl has a chance to escape the camp, but feels uneasy about it, as he’d be leaving some of the patients he’d been caring for there. So he stayed. Tough decision.

p. 105

”...in the final analysis it becomes clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone.”

108. Resurrection, film adapted from a Tolstoy novel.

111 “Provisional existence:” not able to aim at the ultimate goal of one’s life. Happened when people did not know when they would get out of the camp. That caused them to loose their inner resolve to resist the camp’s degrading influences. Days seems like weeks to some prisoners, while weeks past very quickly. Hmm.

p. 117 “Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.”

“The prisoner who has lost faith in the future - his future- was doomed. With his loss of belief in the future, he also lost his spiritual hold; he let himself decline and become subject to mental and physical decay.”

The following, to me, is the core of the book. At the same time, I was reading Creativity, by Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi. He talks about the
same thing, and I incorporated these ideas into a fellowship application I was writing at the time.

121. “He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how.” —Nietzsche.

125

“A very strict camp ruling forbade any efforts to save a man who attempted suicide…Therefore, it was all important to prevent these attempts from occurring.

“I remember two cases of would-be suicide, which bore a striking similarity to each other. Both men talked of their intentions to commit suicide. Both used the typical argument—they had nothing more to expect from life. In both cases it was a question of getting them to realize that life was still expecting something from them; something in the future was expected of them. We found, in fact, that for the one it was his child whom he adored and who was waiting for him in a foreign country. For the other it was a thing, not a person. Tis man was a scientist and had written a series of books which still needed to be finished. His work could not be done by anyone else, any more than another person could ever take the place of the father in his child’s affections.

“This uniqueness and singleness which distinguishes each individual and gives meaning to his existence has a bearing on creative work as much as it does on human love. When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude. A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits from him, or to an unfinished work, will never able to throw away his life. He knows the “why” for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any “how.”