His parents, a brother and his wife had died in the chambers gas. He himself had been tortured and subjected to countless indignities. For months, he could never be sure if the next moment it would also lead to the gas chamber, or stay again among those who were saved, that is, between those who later had to carry the bodies to the crematoria, and then remove the ashes.
Victor Frankl was born in Vienna but was of Jewish origin, and that had led to precisely those Nazi concentration camps of World War II. There he experienced in his own flesh the harsh reality of a tragedy that shocked and surprised even the whole world. Was witness and victim of a huge contempt for others, a whole heap of abuse and disgusting acts that by their size and their cruelty, were a novelty in the history painful.
Frankl was a young psychiatrist, trained in the tradition of the Freudian school, and true to its principles, was deterministic conviction. We thought that what happens to children marks our character and our personality, so that our understanding of things and react to them is essentially already set for the future, but we can not do much to change it.
However, that day, being naked and alone in a small room, Frankl began to become aware of what he called the ultimate freedom, a stronghold of freedom they could never take away. Their guards could control everything around him. They could do whatever they want with their bodies. They could even take his life. But his basic identity would always be safe, just at the mercy of himself.
understood then a new light that he was a self-conscious, capable of observing his own life, able to decide how it could affect everything. Between what was happening and what he did, between stimuli and their response was through their freedom, their power to change that response.
result of these thoughts, Frankl strove to exercise that freedom within their own plot, although subject to many tensions, it was crucial to keep intact. His captors had greater freedom abroad, they had more options to choose from. But he interior could have more freedom, more internal power to decide rightly among the few options presented to his choice.
With this mental attitude, Frankl found the strength to stay true to himself. And thus became an example to those around him, even for some of the guards. He helped others find meaning in their suffering. Encouraged them to maintain their dignity as men in that terrible life of the extermination camps. At the time of so much contempt for others, a contempt as perhaps had not known history, when a human life seemed not worth anything, just then the man's life was particularly valuable.
In the most degrading circumstances imaginable, Frankl was able to capitalize on the singularly human privilege of self-consciousness. And it served to more deeply understand a fundamental principle of human nature: between stimulus and response, human beings have the inner freedom of choice. One freedom that defines us as human beings. Even animals have developed this resource, are programmed by the instinct or training, and can not change that program, nay, nor even aware it exists.
In contrast, men, whatever the circumstances in which we live, we make our own programs, propose projects and achieve in life. We can rise above our instincts, our personal, family or social. Not that these constraints do not influence because they do influence, and a lot, but never get to take away our freedom.
Y are those specifically human qualities that elevate us above the animal world: to the extent that we exercise and develop, we are exercising and developing our human potential.
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