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In the rest of Part One, Frankl offers some higher-level reflections about his experience. At least twice, events impressed upon Frankl the illogic of fate. On one occasion, he chose to join a transport to a so-called “rest camp” for sick prisoners, whom Frankl, as a doctor, would help care for. Other prisoners, believing the transport to be headed for the gas chambers, pleaded with Frankl to get his name taken off the list. But the rest camp turned out to be exactly that, whereas those who stayed behind eventually became so desperate for food that some turned to cannibalism. The other occasion was on Frankl’s last day as an inmate. Through a communication mix-up, he was mistakenly left off a transport that was to leave the camp. He was unhappy, but weeks later he learned that the group he had wanted to join was taken to wooden huts where they were locked in and burned alive. Such events brought to Frankl’s mind the Persian fable about Death, which was able to meet a man in Tehran because that was where the man had fled while seeking to avoid Death elsewhere.

Frankl also found confirmation for his belief that meaning, or purpose, is all-important. The physical and psychological hardships of camp life made many inmates short-tempered and selfish. Others fell into such despair that they lost the will to live, soon dying either by suicide or from illness they could have survived. Frankl was able to prevent two suicides by helping the men remember reasons to live. In the one case, it was a child waiting for the man in a foreign country.  In the other case, the completion of a book series only that man was qualified to write. Finally, a few inmates demonstrated that free will always remained, that when all other hope in life was lost, one could always find meaning in one’s suffering by enduring it bravely and without seeking to escape it at the expense of others. Briefly touching on the psychology of the Capos and the camp guards, Frankl observes that in any population, one can find both good and bad men. Even among the guards there were a few decent fellows.

Read about Main Idea #1: Man needs meaning more than he needs pleasure or status.

The last phase of the inmate’s experience was liberation. There was of course great happiness, but at first the experience had a dreamlike quality, as the freed prisoners struggled to absorb what had happened. Soon other, negative emotions intruded—irritability, bitterness and disillusionment. Having been forced to suppress their resentment over being imprisoned, the freed men now expressed this feeling through petty vandalism and vows of bloody revenge. Returning home, they felt resentment toward former neighbors who greeted them with bland expressions of regret, professions of ignorance at when went on in the camps, and claims that they, too, had suffered. Finally, Frankl and many others who had hoped to be reunited with a loved one endured the crushing disappointment of learning that the loved one had died some time earlier.

Read an explanation of a quote (#3) that suffering can be a source of meaning.

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