16Experiences in a Concentration Camp

Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning, Part One, 1946

Linked to 24 chapters: supports 18 · contradicts 6 · mechanism 8 · same claim 3 · pairing 3

Frankl wrote this account in nine days in 1945, a few months after his liberation, and meant to publish it under his prison number alone. It is not a history of the camps and says so at the start. The great horrors, he writes, had been described often enough, if not often enough believed; his subject is the multitude of small torments, and the question is how ordinary camp life was reflected in the mind of the ordinary prisoner. He was a psychiatrist by training, but in the camps he was number 119,104, a labourer who dug and laid railway track, and a doctor only in the last weeks. What he brought out was a description of three phases the prisoner's mind passed through, admission, entrenchment and release, and an argument that grew from the middle one. Everything could be taken from a person except one thing, the choice of an attitude to what was happening, and the people who kept that choice were the ones who had something to live for, a person or a piece of work that waited on them. The account is honest about its own limits. Only those who had lost every scruple survived on average, he says, and the best did not come back, so the survivor writes as one of the lucky and cannot claim detachment. Part One is written from inside that difficulty and does not resolve it. It ends with a talk given in a dark hut on a day the whole camp had chosen to go hungry rather than give up a thief, and with the man who walks out of the gate and finds he cannot feel glad.

What the account is and is not

The first pages set the frame. Most of what follows happened not in the large famous camps but in the small ones, where most of the killing was done, and it concerns not heroes or martyrs but the unrecorded common prisoner, the one with no mark on his sleeve, whom the trusted prisoners called Capos despised most. The Capos were never hungry, were chosen for a temperament that suited the role, and were demoted at once if they softened; many beat prisoners harder than the guards did. A transport announced as a transfer was known to mean the gas, and the announcement started a free fight over the list, every man trying to get his own name or a friend's struck off, though everyone knew that for each name removed another had to be found. Which man went did not matter, since each was only a number, tattooed on the skin and sewn to the clothes, and a guard who wanted to charge a prisoner glanced at the number and never asked the name.

From this Frankl draws the caveat that governs the rest. A selection was running the whole time, and not only the one the SS made. On average, only those survived who after years of moving from camp to camp had lost all scruples and were ready to use force, theft and the betrayal of friends. "The best of us did not return." The observer who was a prisoner lacks the detachment psychology requires; the outsider who has it was not there. He decided not to hide behind the number after all, because an anonymous account would lose half its value, and he confesses a strong dislike of the exhibitionism the decision cost him. One detail from these pages returns later. Cigarettes were currency, worth soup, and a man who smoked his own had given up; the will to live, once lost, seldom came back.

Admission

The first phase is shock, and it began before the gates. Fifteen hundred people had travelled for days, eighty to a wagon, believing they were bound for a munitions factory, when someone read the name of the station. The camp came into view as barbed wire, searchlights and columns of ragged grey figures, and Frankl's imagination supplied gallows, which he says was just as well, since the horror had to be learned in steps. The receiving squad were prisoners, shaven but well fed and cheerful, and everyone clung to the thought that they might end up in the same position. Frankl gives this its psychiatric name, the delusion of reprieve, the condemned man's certainty that a pardon will come at the last minute, and shows it working on a mass. It survived the shed built for two hundred that held fifteen hundred, and the single piece of bread in four days.

Then the selection. Men and women in two lines, filing past an SS officer who stood at ease, right elbow in his left hand, and pointed a finger left or right, far more often left. Frankl had hidden his pack under his coat, which pulled him to the left; he straightened, and after a hesitation the officer turned him by the shoulders to the right. That evening he learned that for nine in ten of the transport the finger had meant death within hours, in a building marked as a bath, and when he asked after his friend he was pointed to a chimney. What followed stripped the rest away in an afternoon. Watches were talked off wrists in friendly tones. Everything else went into blankets on the floor while people still asked whether they might keep a ring. Frankl showed an old prisoner the manuscript of his life's work rolled inside his coat and asked how to keep it; the man's face went from pity to mockery and he answered with one obscenity. At that moment, Frankl writes, he struck out his whole former life, and that is the end of the first phase. Two minutes by an SS man's watch to undress, every hair shaved, a real shower, and the discovery that all they possessed was their naked existence.

Two reactions came unexpectedly. One was a grim humour, since there was nothing left to lose but their ridiculously naked lives. The other was a cold curiosity, which he had felt once before in a climbing accident, that detached the mind and let it watch the surroundings with something like objectivity; they were curious whether they would catch cold standing wet in the late autumn air, and surprised that they did not. The textbooks were wrong about what a body could bear: nine men sleeping on their sides on a board meant for two, the same shirt for half a year, no infections in filthy cut hands, sound sleep beside a snorer. Nearly everyone thought of suicide, and the camp had a phrase for the usual method, running into the wire. Frankl promised himself on the first evening that he would not, and notes that the promise cost little, because in this phase the prisoner did not fear death; the gas chambers spared him the act. The next morning a colleague who had been there for weeks slipped into the hut with advice. Shave every day, with a piece of glass if need be, at the cost of your last bread, because the only way to stay alive was to look fit for work. A limp seen by the SS meant the gas. Then he pointed at Frankl as the only one in the group who need fear the next selection, and Frankl smiled. He closes the phase with a maxim: an abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behaviour.

Camp life

The second phase is apathy, which he calls a kind of emotional death and also a necessary shell. It deadened first the boundless longing for home, then disgust, which the camp attacked on purpose by setting new arrivals to clear sewage and striking anyone who wiped his face. Frankl marks the change by what he could watch. At first he looked away from a punishment parade. Weeks later he stood unmoved while a twelve-year-old who had been made to stand in the snow without shoes had the gangrenous ends of his toes picked off with tweezers. In the typhus hut he watched the scene that followed every death, one man taking the dead man's potatoes, another his wooden shoes, another his coat, another a piece of string, and then, sipping soup by the window, saw the corpse of a man he had spoken with two hours earlier dragged up the steps with its head knocking on each, and went on sipping. He remembers it, he says, only because his own lack of feeling surprised him as a professional matter.

What got through the shell was not pain but insult. Struck on the head in the bread line because the man behind him stood crooked, he says the blow hurt less than its unreasonableness, and adds that this holds for punished children too. Stopped for a moment on his shovel in a snowstorm, he had a stone thrown at him by a guard who did not think him worth a word, which is how one calls back a domestic animal. A foreman in warm gloves stood over his half-dug trench and promised to have him dead in two days, and asked what he had been, a businessman; Frankl said he was a doctor, and that he had done most of his work for nothing in clinics for the poor, and was knocked down. He tells the story to show that indignation, not about cruelty but about being judged by someone who knew nothing of one's life, could still rouse a hardened prisoner. What kept him alive in that period was a Capo who liked him because Frankl had listened to his marital troubles on the marches, and who gave him a place in the front rows of the column, where a man with feet swollen by oedema fell less often, and soup from the bottom of the vat, where the peas were, and who moved him to another party the day after the foreman's threat.

Apathy narrowed the inner life to a single task, staying alive and keeping one's nearest friend alive. Colleagues trained in psychoanalysis called it regression; dreams were of bread, cake, cigarettes and warm baths, and Frankl once drew back the hand he had raised to wake a man from a nightmare, because nothing in the dream could be worse than what he would wake to. Men talked of food whenever a guard was out of earshot, planning the menus of reunion dinners, which Frankl thought physiologically dangerous for a body adapted to a daily ration of watery soup, ten ounces of bread and a scrap of margarine or sausage. The body consumed its own protein; each man could calculate who in the hut would die next, and looking at himself in the evening louse search thought that this was a corpse already. The great problem of will was the bread in one's pocket: eat it at once, or divide it across the day. He ended a divider. The worst moment was waking, three whistle blasts before dawn and the fight with wet, shrunken shoes; he saw a brave man weep like a child because his would not go on. The one sentiment he records from that time is its absence. When his transport passed through Vienna at night, along the street where he was born, the men at the peephole refused to give him a moment at it. He had lived there, they said; he had seen enough.

Two things survived the hibernation, politics, which meant rumour, and religion, whose depth surprised him, with improvised services in hut corners and in the locked cattle trucks coming back from work. And in some men the inner life deepened rather than shrank. People of delicate constitution and rich inner resources, he observed, often lasted better than the hardy, because they had somewhere to go. His own instance is the march before dawn when a man beside him whispered a hope that their wives were better off, and Frankl found his wife's image in his mind with a clarity that outshone the sunrise, heard her answer, and understood what he calls the truth that love is the final goal a person can reach, and that a man with nothing left can still be fulfilled in the contemplation of the person he loves. He did not know whether she was alive, and states that it would have made no difference to the contemplation; he learned afterwards that she was dead. On his second night in Auschwitz a violin in a warden's party had played a tango, and he had wept, because that day was her twenty-fourth birthday and she was somewhere in the same camp.

The same deepening showed in the way men noticed beauty. Through the barred window of the prison train they watched the Salzburg peaks in the sunset with faces no one would have believed belonged to men who had given up hope. One evening a prisoner ran into the hut to call the others out to see a sunset over the mud huts, and after a silence someone said that the world could be beautiful. A cabaret was improvised, and men came to it though attendance cost them their evening food. Art in that place was grotesque, he says, and its effect came from the contrast. Humour was a weapon too, and could be trained; he and a surgeon friend agreed to invent one funny story a day about life after liberation, and the friend was made to imagine an orderly bursting into his operating theatre shouting the site foreman's cry to work faster. From this he drew a principle that governs the rest of the account. Suffering behaves like a gas. Pumped into an empty chamber it fills the whole chamber whatever its size, and so suffering fills the soul completely whether it is great or small; the size of human suffering is entirely relative. The corollary is that a trifle can give the greatest joy. When the train did not cross the Danube bridge to Mauthausen the wagon danced. When the new camp turned out to have no chimney, the men laughed through a night's punishment parade in the rain.

Camp pleasures were what Schopenhauer called negative happiness, freedom from suffering. In many weeks Frankl counted two positive ones: reaching the queue of the one cook who ladled soup without looking at faces or favouring countrymen, and two days in the sick bay, which is why, shown a magazine photograph of prisoners staring dully from their bunks years later, he could not see what was terrible in it. They might have been the lucky ones. He refuses to judge the men who fed their own people first, and asks who could be sure they would not have done the same. A world that treated a man as an object to be used up and exterminated ate away the sense of being a person at all, unless he fought for it; the prisoners were herded like sheep and, like sheep, pushed into the middle of the column, out of reach of the blows and the wind, under the camp's first law of survival, which was not to be conspicuous. What he craved was five minutes alone, which he found later on the lid of a water shaft behind a hut of fifty delirious patients, beside the tent that held the day's dead, looking at the Bavarian hills through the wire. The list was the only thing that mattered. When a sick convoy was made up, a man who had died before it left was thrown on the cart anyway so that the count was right, and a young man got his brother onto the transport by having him swap numbers with someone who preferred to stay.

Frankl's own decisions in this period he tells against himself. He volunteered for a typhus camp when almost no other doctor would, and calls it not sacrifice but arithmetic, since a labourer as weak as he was would die soon in any case and a doctor's death might at least have some sense. When his name was put on a transport to a supposed rest camp that everyone believed meant the gas, the chief doctor offered to strike it off, and he refused, saying he had learned to let fate take its course, and dictated his will to a friend, three sentences about his wife, to be learned by heart. The transport was genuine, and the camp he left fell to famine and, he learned afterwards, cannibalism. He tells the old story of the servant who fled Death by riding to Tehran, where Death had expected to meet him that night. The prisoner feared decisions above all, and an escape had to be decided in minutes. Frankl was smuggled out once under pretext of a consultation, came back for supplies, searched a deserted women's hut for a rucksack and found a woman's body among the rags, and then, making a last round of his patients, met the look of his only countryman, who was dying and asked whether he too was getting out. He denied it, could not bear the look, and ran to tell his friend he would stay. The unhappiness left him at once and a peace he had never felt took its place. On the last day, with the camp ordered burned at sunset, the two of them planned a second escape by smuggling their packs out in the laundry tub that served as a coffin for the men they had been sent to bury, and were interrupted by a Red Cross car rolling through the gate. That night the SS came anyway with trucks and friendly faces, and the chief doctor, tired or distracted, left the two of them off the count for the last truck. The men who went were locked in huts at a nearby camp and burned; Frankl saw the photographs weeks later. In the morning there was shooting, and a white flag on the gate.

The last freedom

After a page on the ordinary causes of irritability, hunger, vermin, no nicotine and no caffeine, and on the resentment between the degraded majority and the small class of Capos and cooks who felt promoted, Frankl asks whether all this proves that a person is nothing but a product of his surroundings. He answers from what he saw. There were men who walked through the huts comforting others and giving away their last bread. They were few, but they prove that everything can be taken from a man except the last of the human freedoms, to choose his attitude in any set of circumstances. Every hour offered a decision about whether to submit to the powers that were trying to remove the self, and the person a prisoner became was in the end the result of an inner decision and not of the camp alone. He cites Dostoevsky's fear of not being worthy of his sufferings, and says he met people who were. From this he sets out the shape that his later work would formalise. A life can realise values in creative work; a life can find fulfilment in experiencing beauty, art or nature; and a life barred from both still has one possibility, the attitude a person takes to an existence restricted by forces outside it. If life has a meaning at all, suffering must have one, since it cannot be removed from life. Only a few reached that standard, he admits, but one example is proof enough of what is possible. His example is a young woman who knew she would die within days and told him she was grateful that fate had hit her so hard, because she had never taken the inner life seriously before; her only friend was a chestnut branch with two blossoms outside the window, and when he asked, uneasily, whether it answered her, she said that it did, and that it said it was life, eternal life.

The most depressing feature of the camp, former prisoners agree, was not its severity but the fact that no one knew how long it would last. Frankl borrows a psychologist's phrase, provisional existence, and adds his own qualification, of unknown limit. The Latin finis means both an end and a goal, and a man who cannot see the one cannot aim at the other; he stops living for the future and the structure of his inner life changes, as it does in the unemployed, whose sense of time is known to deform, and in the sanatorium patients of Thomas Mann's novel who also have no date. In camp a day lasted longer than a week. A man who marched in from the station felt he was walking to his own funeral. The danger of the retreat into the past, which had been a refuge, was that treating the present as unreal meant missing the chances it did hold. Frankl's own remedy was to force his mind forward. Limping to the work site with sores on his feet and his thoughts full of shoelace wire and whether to trade a cigarette for soup, he made himself see a warm, well-lit lecture hall in which he was explaining the psychology of the concentration camp to an audience in upholstered seats, and found that once his suffering had become an object of study it was, in the terms of a sentence of Spinoza he quotes, no longer suffering.

The prisoner who lost faith in his future was lost, and the loss showed as a sudden crisis everyone recognised: one morning the man would not dress or wash or go to parade, and lay in his own filth, and nothing reached him. Frankl's senior block warden, a composer, confided a dream in which a voice had promised him that the war would be over for him on the thirtieth of March. As the date approached and the news made it plain that it would not, he fell ill on the twenty-ninth, was delirious on the thirtieth, and was dead on the thirty-first, of typhus to all appearances. Frankl reads it as the loss of hope lowering the body's resistance to an infection it was already carrying, and adds the camp doctor's observation that deaths in the week between Christmas 1944 and the new year rose beyond anything seen before, with no change in work, food, weather or disease to explain it, only the passing of the day by which most of the men had expected to be home. This is one case and one impression, and he gives it as such.

So the only therapy available in the camp was to give a man a future goal, and Frankl's motto for it is Nietzsche's: "He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how." The men who said they had nothing more to expect from life were the ones who died. What was needed, he says, was to turn the question round. It did not matter what they expected from life; what mattered was what life expected from them, and the answer was not in talk but in conduct, in the tasks life set each person hour by hour. Because the tasks differ from person to person and moment to moment, the meaning of life cannot be stated in general, and each situation has one right answer, sometimes action, sometimes contemplation, sometimes acceptance. When suffering is a person's lot it becomes their task, and no one can carry it for them. He insists this was not philosophy at a distance but the only thought that held them, and that once suffering was understood as a task they no longer wanted to soften it with illusions. Tears were nothing to be ashamed of; a comrade said he had wept his oedema out of his system. Two men who had said they meant to kill themselves were turned back by the same argument: one had a child waiting for him abroad, the other a series of scientific books that nobody else could finish. Neither could be replaced, and a man who sees that he cannot be replaced sees the size of his responsibility and will not throw his life away.

The last episode of the phase is a talk. Notice had been posted that minor thefts and the cutting of blanket strips for ankle wrappings would be punished by hanging; a starving man had broken into the potato store, and the camp had been told to name him or fast for a day, and the two and a half thousand men had chosen to fast. That evening the light failed and tempers were at their lowest, and the block warden, whom Frankl calls a wise man, spoke about the comrades who had died in the past days and why, and asked Frankl to say something. He was cold and hungry and had no wish to preach, and did it anyway. He said that whoever was still alive had reason to hope, that nothing irreplaceable had yet been lost by most of them, that no one knew what the next hour would bring, that his own chance of survival he put at one in twenty and that he did not mean to give up on that account. He said that nothing they had experienced or done or suffered could be taken from them, that having been is a kind of being and perhaps the surest kind. He said that life never ceases to have meaning, and that the meaning includes suffering and dying, and that someone, a wife or a friend or a God, was looking down and would not want to find them suffering miserably rather than proudly. He spoke of a comrade who on arrival had made a pact with heaven that his own death would spare the person he loved a painful end. When the bulb came on again, men limped over to thank him with tears in their eyes. He adds that only too rarely did he have the strength to do this, and that he must have missed many chances.

After liberation

Before the third phase he answers the question he was always asked, about the guards. Some were sadists in the clinical sense, and those were the ones sent when a hard detachment was wanted; most had simply been dulled by years of watching, and refused to take part but did nothing to stop it; and a few took pity, including the commander of his last camp, who had secretly bought medicine for the prisoners from his own pocket, while the senior camp warden, a prisoner, was harder than any guard. The knowledge that a man was a guard or a prisoner, he concludes, tells you almost nothing. There are two races of men, the decent and the indecent, and both run through every group. The camp tore the soul open, and what was found at the bottom was a mixture of good and evil.

Liberation itself brought no joy. The prisoners walked out of the gate timidly, past guards in hastily found civilian clothes who offered cigarettes, into meadows full of flowers, and felt nothing. They had lost the ability to be pleased and had to relearn it. Frankl calls the state depersonalisation: everything seemed a dream, and they had been deceived by that dream too many times. The body recovered first and ate for days. Speech came next, in floods. Feeling came last, and for Frankl it came on a walk through fields with larks overhead, when he found himself on his knees with one sentence in his head, a psalm about calling from a narrow prison and being answered in the freedom of space. Then he sets out the dangers of the phase, with the analogy of the diver's bends: a mind released from great pressure too suddenly can be damaged by the release. Some men, once free, used their freedom as licence and became the oppressors, and justified it by what had been done to them. A friend dragged him across a field of young oats and shouted that after his wife and child had been gassed no one would stop him treading on a few stalks; another swore to stain his hand with blood the day he got home; and these, Frankl says, were not bad men. They had to be led back to the plain truth that no one has the right to do wrong, even if wrong was done to them.

Two other things waited outside: bitterness and disillusionment. Bitterness came from the town, where a returning man met shrugs and the same two phrases, that people had not known and that they too had suffered. Disillusionment came from fate. A man who had believed he had reached the limit of suffering discovered that suffering had no limit, and the one who had been told in camp to hold on for the person who waited for him might travel home, press the bell, and find that the person who should have opened the door was not there and never would be. They had told each other in camp that no happiness could repay what they had suffered, and they had not been prepared for unhappiness. The account ends on the day that comes to every survivor when the whole of it seems a nightmare, and on what he calls the crowning experience of the homecoming man, that after all he has suffered there is nothing left to fear except his God.

Since 1946

The account appeared in German in 1946 and in English in 1959, was joined in 1962 by the second part that turns it into a theory, acquired a postscript in 1984, and had sold more than three million copies in English by 1992, a success Frankl attributed not to himself but to the misery of a time in which so many people reached for a book with the meaning of life in its title. It became the standard example of a testimony that is also an argument, and the argument has been questioned on grounds the book itself supplies. Frankl says the survivors were the scrupleless and the lucky, and then draws his proof of inner freedom from the few who were neither; he offers one example as sufficient, which is true of a possibility and not of a rule. The claim that lost hope lowers immunity rests on one death and one doctor's impression of one week. Later biographers established that his own time in Auschwitz lasted days, in October 1944, and that most of the account is set in two small camps near Dachau, which he tells the reader in his opening pages and which readers regularly forget; his first wife died in Bergen-Belsen, and his parents in Theresienstadt and Auschwitz. Critics have found the book's serenity hard to square with the events, and its philosophy easier to detach from them than Frankl intended. What has held up is the observation rather than the doctrine: the three phases, the delusion of reprieve, apathy as a shell, the deformation of time in an existence with no fixed end, and the fact, recorded again in every later study of confinement and unemployment, that people last longer when something outside themselves is waiting on them.