Meaning Read online

  COLLEAGUE: They, too, had choices; or did fear rob them of that?

  FRANKL: Fear? Fear? Almost a meaningless word in the camps.

  COLLEAGUE: You were afraid.

  FRANKL: Of course. You would need to be crazy not to. But, these men soon became much like the SS men and the camp wardens. They can all be judged on a similar psychological basis.

  Wednesday Lecture, 1966. Source: Viktor Frankl Institute, Vienna, Austria.

  COLLEAGUE: Are you judging? You who understood it all?

  FRANKL: You can understand and judge. That is what makes us human. To understand does not remove the obligation to judge. Or to forgive.

  COLLEAGUE: Fancy words. I need to hear more.

  FRANKL: Nietzsche said, “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.”

  COLLEAGUE: Fancy thought, nicely phrased. Out of what concentration camp did Nietzsche come?

  FRANKL: You do not have to suffer to learn. But, if you don’t learn from suffering over which you have no control, then your life becomes truly meaningless.

  Frankl, 1994.

  COLLEAGUE: You don’t recommend suffering for learning?

  FRANKL: Only if it is beyond your control …

  End of Scene 1

  Scene 2

  A Selection Process:

  Camp to Camp

  Title Board: A SELECTION PROCESS

  Moving from one camp to another

  Capo; Frankl; Man; Colleague

  Visual: A camp scene outside the huts.

  Stage Directions: Standing and talking before the screen. Frankl and Colleague are joined by Man. The Capo leaves after his opening lines.

  Camp.

  Source: Hartmann, E. (1995). In the Camps.

  CAPO: Tomorrow morning we will be moving fifty of you to another camp. This is a rest camp where you don’t work so hard. There are even doctors and some nurses. I’ve been told they even have some medicine. We’ll make the selection tonight. Think about it—a rest camp. It’s hard to believe they’re so generous. But that’s what I’ve been told. Think about it. I’ll consider requests. [Leaves.]

  FRANKL: They’ve said that before.

  MAN: This Capo is almost honest. Remember when he turned a blind eye? I’m thinking of volunteering.

  FRANKL: They’ll only take those too weak to work. I’m staying here. You stay, too.

  MAN: Who can we get in our place? They just want numbers. Maybe, the bosses want fresh blood to do their work. Too many weak ones here.

  FRANKL: We can tell them of our special skills. I’m a doctor.

  MAN: So, who needs you here? You have no office, no instruments, no medicines. You’ll survive as long as you can move dirt with a shovel, pick a hole. Doctors!

  FRANKL: All they think about are our numbers. Can’t wash them off. We’re only numbers to them. No names. Any guard can make a charge by reading a number.

  MAN: There are those six in the corner—they’re good for nothing now. We’ll give their names.

  FRANKL: Is it better we should do the choosing?

  COLLEAGUE: Better? Better? At least when they choose there’s some kind of crazy logic—take the weakest and the sickest. Once you start choosing, Viktor, you are no different than the Capos. No different, you hear?

  FRANKL: I must stay alive for my family, to help my friends here.

  COLLEAGUE: Keep talking.

  FRANKL: There is my work, the book, my whole life. My wife.

  COLLEAGUE: Keep talking. You’ll convince yourself. You’ve written something for the book in your head.

  FRANKL: Yes. Yes. Listen. With no hesitation a prisoner would arrange for another prisoner, another “number,” to take his place in the transport. The process of selecting the Capos was a negative one; only the most brutal of the prisoners were chosen for this job, although there were some happy exceptions—very few, very few. Apart from the selection of the Capos by the SS, there was a sort of self-selecting process going on the whole time among the prisoners. On the average, only those prisoners could keep alive who, after years of trekking from camp to camp, had lost all scruples in their fight for existence.

  MAN: Who shall we pick?

  COLLEAGUE: Think, Viktor, think.

  FRANKL: They were prepared to use every means, honest, and otherwise, even brutal force, theft, and betrayal of their friends, in order to save themselves.

  COLLEAGUE: Think.

  Viktor Frankl, 1940.

  FRANKL: We who have come back, by the aid of many lucky chances or miracles—whatever one may choose to call them—we know: the best of us did not return.

  MAN: We have to choose.

  FRANKL: I choose not to choose. I’ve been protected before, chance or miracle or …

  COLLEAGUE: You’ve chosen!

  End of Scene 2

  Scene 3

  Premium Coupons

  Title Board: EARNING PREMIUM COUPONS

  Just before Christmas 1944

  Colleague; Frankl

  Visual: Group working for a construction firm, digging.

  Stage Directions: Play “Die Moorsoldaten” (the peat bog soldiers) softly in the background.

  Trench digging.

  Source: Poznanski, S. (1963). Struggle, Death, Memory. 1939–1945.

  COLLEAGUE: You were a psychiatrist. What did you do in the camps?

  FRANKL: I’m going to tell you, not without pride, that I was not employed as a psychiatrist in the camp. Or even as a doctor, except for the last few weeks. Some of my colleagues were lucky enough to be employed in poorly heated first-aid posts, applying bandages made of scraps of waste paper. But I was Number 119,104, and most of the time I was digging and laying tracks for railway lines.

  COLLEAGUE: You survived as a number, digging real dirt rather than that buried in the souls of your captors.

  FRANKL: Have it your way. At one time, my job was to dig a tunnel, without help, for a water main under the road. This feat did not go unrewarded.

  COLLEAGUE: How so?

  FRANKL: Just before Christmas 1944, I was presented with a gift of so-called “premium coupons.” These were issued by the construction firm to which we were practically sold as slaves. The firm paid the camp authorities a fixed price per day, per prisoner.

  COLLEAGUE: Generous of them.

  FRANKL: The coupons cost the firm fifty pfennigs each and could be exchanged for six cigarettes, often weeks later. I became the proud owner of a token worth twelve cigarettes. Imagine that!

  COLLEAGUE: You can’t live on cigarettes.

  FRANKL: Ah, but the cigarettes could be exchanged for twelve soups and—

  COLLEAGUE: —and that made the difference between starving and—

  FRANKL: No. Not starving. Just a brief respite from starving. Just a brief respite.

  COLLEAGUE: Tell me more about these cigarettes.

  FRANKL: Yes. In fact the privilege of actually smoking cigarettes was reserved for the Capo, who had his assured quota of weekly coupons. Sometimes it was for a prisoner who worked as a foreman in a warehouse or a workshop. He received a few cigarettes in exchange for doing dangerous jobs.

  COLLEAGUE: How nice.

  FRANKL: There was an exception. This was for those who had lost the will to live and wanted to “enjoy” their last days. When we saw a comrade smoking his own cigarettes, we knew he had given up faith in his strength to carry on. Once that faith was lost, the will to live seldom returned.

  COLLEAGUE: The condemned man smoking his last cigarette?

  FRANKL: We were all condemned. They made this their last choice.

  Frankl in New York, 1968.

  End of Scene 3

  Scene 4

  The First Phase is Shock

  Title Board: THE FIRST PHASE IS SHOCK

  Arriving at Auschwitz

  Frankl; Colleague; Inmate

  Visual: Cattle cars delivering prisoners. “Selection” process at a camp.

  Stage Directions: Use several slides of prisoners arriving at
a camp.

  The infamous Dr Mengele at the station at Auschwitz during the “selection.”

  Source: Frankl, V.E. (1997). Viktor Frankl Recollections. An Autobiography

  FRANKL: The symptom that characterizes the first phase is shock.

  COLLEAGUE: You are giving your formal lecture now or reliving?

  FRANKL: There is no way to distinguish between the two—when I describe, no matter how scientifically, I am there.

  Disembarkation at Auschwitz, Birkenau.

  Source: Fischel, J.R. (1998). The Holocaust.

  COLLEAGUE: Continue.

  FRANKL: Fifteen hundred persons had been traveling by train for several days and several nights. There were eighty people in each coach. All had to lie on top of their luggage. The carriages were so full that only the tops of the windows were free to let in the gray light of dawn. The engine’s whistle had an uncanny sound, like a cry for help. We didn’t know where we were. Then the train shunted. Suddenly, a cry broke out, “There is a sign. Auschwitz!” Everyone’s heart missed a beat. Auschwitz—the very name stood for all that was horrible: gas chambers, crematoriums, massacres.

  COLLEAGUE: How did they know?

  FRANKL: Rumors in the night. That name had a horror.

  COLLEAGUE: Go on.

  FRANKL: The train moved almost hesitantly, as if it wanted to spare its passengers the realization of Auschwitz. With the dawn, the outlines of an immense camp became visible: barbed-wire fences, watchtowers, searchlights. And long columns of ragged human figures, themselves gray in the grayness of the dawn. Walking the desolate roads to where we knew not. There were isolated shouts and whistles of command—we did not know their meaning.

  Summer, 1942: Jews being loaded on to a death train in Stawki Street (so called Umschlagplatz).

  Source: Bartoszewski, W. (1968). Warsaw Death Ring. 1939–1944.

  COLLEAGUE: Not knowing is more terrifying than knowing.

  FRANKL: Eventually, we moved into the station. Shouted commands. The carriage doors were flung open and a small detachment of prisoners stormed inside. They wore striped uniforms, their heads were shaved, but, surprisingly, they looked well fed. They spoke every European tongue—and all with a certain sense of humor—which sounded grotesque at the time. Like a drowning man my inborn optimism clung to this thought: these prisoners live quite well and even laugh. Who knows? I might share their good fortune.

  COLLEAGUE: A delusion. A dangerous delusion.

  Cattle cars.

  Source: Poznanski, S. (1963). Struggle, Death, Memory. 1939–1945.

  FRANKL: Yes. You know, in psychiatry there is a certain condition known as “delusion of reprieve.” The condemned man, immediately before his execution, gets the illusion that he might be reprieved at the very last minute. We believed that, too. Those special prisoners fooled us. They were a chosen elite who were this receiving squad. They took charge of us and our belongings; smuggled jewelry filling dead storehouses.

  COLLEAGUE: The spoils of war.

  FRANKL: Not spoils. Outright robbery, debasement, thievery.

  COLLEAGUE: All armies do this.

  FRANKL: Not to civilians. Not in modern times.

  COLLEAGUE: Be honest. In all times armies did this. Were the Nazis so different?

  Cattle cars.

  Source: Poznanski, S. (1963). Struggle, Death, Memory. 1939–1945.

  FRANKL: Yes. They were organized, they were “scientific.”

  COLLEAGUE: So were the Romans.

  FRANKL: I’ll not argue with you. Let me continue. We were fifteen hundred people crammed in a space for two hundred. One five-ounce piece of bread in four days. We still lived under the illusion of being reprieved.

  COLLEAGUE: Then there was the selection …

  FRANKL: We were told to leave our luggage in the train and to fall into two lines—women on one side, and men on the other. This was to file past a senior SS officer. I had the courage to hide my haversack under my coat. If found, at the minimum I would be knocked down. So, instinctively, I straightened to conceal my heavy load. Then I was face to face with him. He was in a spotless uniform. Spotless. With careless ease, his right arm supported in his left hand, he lifted his right forefinger, leisurely pointing to the right or left.

  COLLEAGUE: Right or left?

  FRANKL: We had no idea what that small gesture foreboded. But, there were more to the left than the right. I just waited for things to take their course.

  COLLEAGUE: Fatalism is also an action.

  FRANKL: This was the first of many such times—choices beyond my control. I made an effort to walk upright. He looked me over, and then put both hands on my shoulders. I tried very hard to look smart. He turned my shoulders very slowly until I faced right, and I moved over to that side.

  [Have an actor silently do the choosing and do this.]

  COLLEAGUE: It was obviously to life. Why did he make that extra choice? Was God’s hands guiding his hands? Left or right?

  FRANKL: Ninety percent went left—it meant death. Asentence that was carried out within the next few hours. Straight to the crematorium. To the bath.

  COLLEAGUE: They were fooled.

  FRANKL: Yes. The word “bath” was written on its doors in several languages. In the evening, I asked about a friend.

  INMATE: Was he sent to the left side?

  FRANKL: Yes.

  INMATE: Then you can see him there.

  FRANKL: Where?

  INMATE: That column of flames from the chimney. That’s where your friend is, floating up to Heaven.

  FRANKL: I don’t understand.

  COLLEAGUE: That such evil is possible …

  INMATE: Dust to dust. Ashes to ashes. Smoke.

  End of Scene 4

  Scene 5

  The Bath—Textbooks Tell Lies!

  Title Board: THE CLEANSING STATION AT THE CAMP

  This was a real bath

  Frankl; Colleague; Inmate; Guard

  Visual: Blurred series of slides showing people stripping and then dressing in odd-sized clothing.

  Stage Directions: Add sound effects of background of showers, dropping shoes, guards giving orders.

  FRANKL: They took us to the cleansing station. This was a real bath. The SS men almost seemed charming—another illusion of reprieve. We handed over our watches and other jewelry in hopes of buying a favor.

  COLLEAGUE: Illusions. All illusions.

  FRANKL: We had to throw all of our possessions in blankets. No one could grasp the idea that nothing was left to us.

  INMATE: What do you want?

  FRANKL: Look. This is the manuscript of a scientific book in my pocket.

  INMATE: So?

  FRANKL: I know what you’re thinking—I should be grateful to escape with my life.

  INMATE: A piece of paper.

  FRANKL: I cannot help myself. I must keep this manuscript at all costs. It contains my life’s work.

  INMATE: Shit! That’s all that’s good for. Shit!

  COLLEAGUE: And you lost it all.

  GUARD: I will give you two minutes, and I will time you by my watch. In these two minutes you will get fully undressed and drop everything on the floor where you are standing. You will take nothing with you except your shoes, your belt or suspenders, and possibly a truss. I am starting to count—now!

  [Behind the scrim begins the shadow play of tearing off clothes. There is whipping. Heads and bodies are shaved. Then the showers. Some play of covering nakedness. Frankl retains his glasses and his belt, sorting through piles of clothes for some that fit.]

  COLLEAGUE: You found some clothes.

  FRANKL: Finding shoes was the hardest.

  COLLEAGUE: You were still thinking.

  FRANKL: There was a strange kind of humor in the showers and with the clothes. Yet my strongest sensation was curiosity. Once, when my life was endangered by a climbing accident, I felt only curiosity at the critical moment—curiosity as to whether I should come out of it alive.

  Jerzy Potrze
bowski: “Selection of the sick for the gas chamber” (Drawing).

  Source: Poznanski, S. (1963). Struggle, Death, Memory. 1939–1945.

  COLLEAGUE: This was very different.

  FRANKL: Not really. Cold curiosity predominated in Auschwitz. Somehow, detaching the mind from its surroundings was a kind of objectivity. This curiosity evolved into surprise.

  COLLEAGUE: Strange.

  FRANKL: Strange, but true. In the chill of late autumn, stark naked, wet, and cold. We were surprised that we did not catch cold. Textbooks tell lies.

  COLLEAGUE: Tell me more.

  FRANKL: Somewhere it is said that man cannot exist without sleep for a certain number of hours. Quite wrong! I had been convinced I could only sleep in a certain way, with certain things.

  COLLEAGUE: That’s true!

  Inside a hut.

  Source: Hartmann, E. (1995). In the Camps.

  COLLEAGUE: That’s true!

  FRANKL: Hah! In Auschwitz we slept in beds constructed in tiers. On each tier which was about six and one-half to eight feet, nine men slept, and directly on the boards. Directly. Only arms which were near to dislocation for pillows. Of course, we could only lie on our sides, crowded and huddled together. This was actually an advantage.