Meaning Page 4
GUARD: Move. Move. What do you see up there?
FRANKL: A thought transfixed me. The first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, and philosophers—the truth that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire.
GUARD: A good kick is what you need. Get up. Move.
FRANKL: Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.
GUARD: Thinking again, are you? Take that and that! March.
FRANKL: Yes, thank you for the blows. Thank you.
COLLEAGUE: You thanked him?
FRANKL: Inside. You see, I now 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 suffering 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.
COLLEAGUE: You finally learned.
FRANKL: Yes. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, “The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.”
GUARD: Fall down, will you? Take that. And you clods falling on him. Get up. Get up. March. Arbeit Macht frei. You hear, Arbeit Macht frei. March.
COLLEAGUE: He interrupted you.
FRANKL: For a moment, but soon my soul found its way back and I resumed talk with my loved one. I asked her questions, and she answered. She questioned me in return and I answered.
Arbeit Macht Frei.
Source: Hartmann, E. (1995). In the Camps.
GUARD: Stop! Get your tools. No fighting. Dig. Dig.
FRANKL: We assaulted the frozen ground. Sparks flew from our pickaxes. My comrades were silent, brains numb.
COLLEAGUE: But you couldn’t stop your thoughts.
FRANKL: My mind still clung to the image of my wife. A thought crossed my mind: I didn’t even know if she were alive. I knew only one thing: Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance.
GUARD: Dig. You must dig. Arbeit Macht frei.
COLLEAGUE: You did not know.
FRANKL: I did not know whether my wife was alive or not, and I had no means of finding out, but at that moment it ceased to matter.
COLLEAGUE: Strange.
The wedding of Tilly Grosser, 1941.
Source: Viktor Frankl Institute, Vienna, Austria.
FRANKL: Strange, perhaps. But, there was no need for me to know; nothing could touch the strength of my love, my thoughts, and the image of my beloved. Had I known then that my wife was dead, I think that I would still have given myself, undisturbed by that knowledge, to the contemplation of her image, and that my mental conversation with her would have been just as vivid and satisfying.
COLLEAGUE: Just as vivid.
FRANKL: Yes. As it is said, “Set me like a seal upon thy heart, love is as strong as death.”
End of Scene 10
Scene 11
The Inner Life of the Prisoner
Title Board: THE INNER LIFE OF THE PRISONER
Sunsets are free
Colleague; Frankl; Guard
Visual: Camp photo. Sunset superimposed over camp. Digging. Photo of Tilly Frankl.
Stage Directions: Start with photo of the inside of a hut. Then the outside. Then a sunset. Digging. End up with photo of Tilly Frankl.
COLLEAGUE: You had only your thoughts, your inner thoughts, through that long time. Tell me about that.
FRANKL: Yes, the inner life. As it became more intense for each prisoner, he also experienced the beauty of art and nature as never before. Under their influence he sometimes even forgot his own frightful circumstances.
COLLEAGUE: Give me an example.
FRANKL: Yes. Yes. You know, if someone had seen our faces on the journey from Auschwitz to a Bavarian camp as we beheld the mountains of Salzburg with their summits glowing in the sunset, through the little barred windows of the prison carriage, he would never have believed that those were the faces of men who had given up all hope of life and liberty. Despite that factor—or maybe because of it—we were carried away by nature’s beauty.
COLLEAGUE: Can you give me some more examples?
FRANKL: In camp a man might draw the attention of a comrade to a nice view of the setting sun shining through the tall trees of the Bavarian woods.
COLLEAGUE: As in that famous watercolor by Dürer.
FRANKL: Yes. I even recall one remarkable evening when we were already resting dead tired on the floor of our hut, soup bowls in hand, when a fellow prisoner rushed in and asked us outside to see the wonderful sunset.
COLLEAGUE: And you all went?
FRANKL: Those who could, to see sinister clouds glowing in the west, and the whole sky alive with clouds of ever-changing shapes and colors, from steel blue to blood red. The desolate gray mud huts provided a sharp contrast, while the puddles on the muddy ground reflected the glowing sky. Then, then, after minutes of moving silence, one prisoner said, “How beautiful the world could be!”
COLLEAGUE: Could be. Could be. And you continued your inner life, the conversations with your wife?
FRANKL: Of course. There was another day we were at work in a trench. I was again conversing silently with my wife, or perhaps I was struggling to find the reason for my sufferings.
COLLEAGUE: You were struggling with your slow dying.
Viktor Frankl in his office clinic, 1985.
FRANKL: Then, in a last violent protest against the hopelessness of my imminent death, I sensed my spirit soaring outwards. It transcended that hopeless, meaningless world, and from somewhere I heard a victorious “Yes” in answer to my question.
COLLEAGUE: The question of the existence of an ultimate purpose.
FRANKL: And at that moment, that very moment, a light was lit in a distant farmhouse, in the midst of a miserable gray of a dawn in Bavaria—“The light shineth in the darkness.”
COLLEAGUE: “Et lux in tenebris lucet.”
GUARD: Stop dreaming. Work. Dig, you lazy piece of shit.
FRANKL: Once again I communed with my wife. She was with me. I had the feeling that I was able to touch her. The feeling was very strong: she was there. Then, at that very moment, a bird flew down silently and perched just in front of me, on the heap of soil I had just dug, and looked steadily at me.
COLLEAGUE: Who was that bird?
Fences.
Source: Hartmann, E. (1995). In the Camps.
End of Scene 11
Scene 12
Psychological Factors
in the Camps
Title Board: PSYCHOLOGICAL FACTORS IN THE CAMPS
Suffering and Eternal Life
Colleague; Frankl; Man; Woman
Visual: Woman in camp clothes, view of tree branch through a window.
Stage Directions: Sounds of wind in trees, running water, birdsong.
COLLEAGUE: You’re a psychiatrist. You must have been studying yourself and the prisoners and your keepers all of the time. What did you learn?
FRANKL: Apathy was endemic—epidemic might be a better word. The majority of the prisoners suffered from a kind of inferiority complex. On the outside we fancied ourselves as “somebody”; here we were treated like complete nonentities.
COLLEAGUE: What about the special prisoners, the ones you called “prominent”? You know, the Capos, the cooks, the storekeepers, and the camp policemen.
FRANKL: They didn’t feel degraded at all—on the contrary, promoted! What do you think of that Capo?
MAN: Imagine! I knew that man when he was only a bank president. Isn’t it fortunate that he has risen s
o far in the world?
COLLEAGUE: Is everything relative?
FRANKL: Yes and no. Survival is an absolute. We always have choice of action, if not external, then internal. Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind.
COLLEAGUE: Even in those camps?
FRANKL: Yes. We who lived there can remember men who comforted others, gave away their last piece of bread.
COLLEAGUE: Not many!
FRANKL: Enough. Enough. They may have been very few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
COLLEAGUE: As you did.
FRANKL: To survive as a human being. Every day had opportunities to make a decision which determined whether or not you would submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom. Any man can decide what shall become of him—mentally and spiritually.
COLLEAGUE: Wasn’t it Dostoyevsky who said, “There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings”?
FRANKL: Yes. Those words came to me often, especially about those martyrs in the camp whose suffering and death bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom cannot be lost—the way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement.
COLLEAGUE: Is such suffering necessary?
FRANKL: If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.
COLLEAGUE: Again I ask, is suffering necessary?
FRANKL: No. It is not necessary. Yet, there are often circumstances beyond our control—the camps, accidents, diseases—that happen. The way in which a man accepts his fate—those things beyond his control—can add a deeper meaning to his life. He controls how he responds.
COLLEAGUE: Few can do that.
FRANKL: Of the prisoners, it is true that only a few kept their full inner liberty and attained these values, but even one such example is sufficient proof that man’s inner strength may raise him above his outward fate. And such men are not only in concentration camps—those opportunities are everywhere. Let me tell you a story.
COLLEAGUE: I’m listening!
FRANKL: I met a young woman in the camps who knew that she would die in the next few days.
Two survivors in Bergen-Belsen, April 30, 1945.
Source: Zelizer, B. (2000). Visual Culture and The Holocaust.
WOMAN: I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard. In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously.
FRANKL: Yes.
WOMAN: This tree here out my window is the only friend I have in my loneliness. I can see just one branch of that chestnut tree—on that branch are two blossoms. Do you see, too?
FRANKL: Yes.
WOMAN: I often talk to this tree.
FRANKL: Does the tree reply?
WOMAN: Yes.
FRANKL: What does it say?
WOMAN: I am here—I am here—I am life, eternal life.
The Wailing Wall, 1988.
End of Scene 12
Scene 13
Being a Typhus Doctor and
Acting Like a Sheep
Title Board: BEING A TYPHUS DOCTOR
Acting like a sheep
Colleague; Frankl
Visual: Doctor examining a patient. Sheep and
crowds of prisoners. Corpses. Tilly Frankl.
Stage Directions: When showing sheep and crowds of prisoners, add low level of sheepdogs barking. Have photo of Tilly Frankl at end—start out sharp and then lose focus as light fades.
COLLEAGUE: You did work as a doctor sometimes, didn’t you?
FRANKL: I was on my fourth day in the sick quarters when the chief doctor rushed in and asked me to volunteer for medical duties in another camp containing typhus patients. Against the urgent advice of my friends, I decided to volunteer. You see, I knew that in a working party I would die in a short time. But, if I had to die, there might at least be some sense in my death. For me, this was simple mathematics, not sacrifice.
Lumbar puncture, 1940.
Source: Viktor Frankl Institute, Vienna, Austria.
COLLEAGUE: Very fortunate, and very realistic.
FRANKL: More than you can imagine, for secretly the warrant officer had ordered that the two doctors who had volunteered should “be taken care of” till they left. We looked so weak that he feared we might die.
COLLEAGUE: Another strange miracle on your path to survival.
FRANKL: Those odd circumstances, and acting like a sheep.
COLLEAGUE: Like a sheep?
FRANKL: Yes, of course. We were herded everywhere. Safety was not only being in the flock, but the center of the flock. There, the bad dogs and the herders could not get at you. One of the camp’s most imperative survival laws was: Do not be conspicuous—we tried at all times to avoid the attention of the SS.
COLLEAGUE: Still, there must have been a great craving for some solitude, to be alone with your thoughts.
FRANKL: After my transportation to a so-called “rest camp,” I had the rare fortune to find solitude for about five minutes at a time. Behind the earthen hut where I worked, and in which were crowded about fifty delirious patients, there was a quiet spot in the corner of the double fence of barbed wire. A tent sheltered the half-dozen daily corpses.
COLLEAGUE: A bad place.
FRANKL: Corpses, I was used to. But there was also a wooden lid over a shaft leading to the water pipes. Whenever I could steal a few minutes, I squatted on this lid and looked out at the green flowering slopes and distant hills of the Bavarian landscape. I dreamed longingly.
COLLEAGUE: But not for long.
FRANKL: A passing guard or my duties called me back. The medical supply might be five to ten aspirins, which we only used for those who still had some hope. For the light cases, all I could do was give some words of encouragement.
COLLEAGUE: You practiced your own form of triage.
FRANKL: There was no choice. Medicine would not have helped the desperately ill.
COLLEAGUE: Life had little value there.
FRANKL: The camp inmate was hardened. For example, when a convoy of sick men was arranged, it was only the number that counted—if a man died before the cart left, his body was thrown on to the cart to keep the number correct! The list was the only thing that mattered.
COLLEAGUE: Their records had to be correct.
FRANKL: The prisoners had to use every means to improve their chances of survival. They were not sentimental, but also completely dependent on the moods of the guards—mere playthings of fate.
A British soldier clearing corpses at Bergen-Belsen.
Source: Zelizer, B. (2000). Visual Culture and The Holocaust.
COLLEAGUE: Yet, within those random events, something, perhaps someone, took care of you.
FRANKL: I had learned to let fate take its course. I stayed with the transfer to the “rest camp” even though my friends told me it would be my death. It wasn’t. They even reverted to cannibalism in that camp after I left—it got so bad.
COLLEAGUE: You were not afraid.
FRANKL: I was always afraid. I even made my friend Otto memorize my will in case he survived and I didn’t.
COLLEAGUE: Do you remember that will?
FRANKL: I said, “Listen, Otto, if I don’t get back home to my wife, and if you should see her again, then tell her that I talked of her hourly, daily. You remember. Secondly, I have loved her more than anyone. Thirdly, the short time I have been married to her outweighs everything, even all we have gone through here.”
COLLEAGUE: And, Otto?
FRANKL: I never saw him again. Or my wife. Or my wife.
End of Scene 13
Scene 14
The Science Teacher
Title Board: THE SCIENCE TE
ACHER
Oxidationalism
Science Teacher; Frankl; Colleague
Visual: Classroom, molecules, picture of thirteen-year-old Frankl.
Stage Directions: Use slides to illustrate this vignette.
Frankl’s family, 1925.
Source: Viktor Frankl Institute, Vienna, Austria.
SCIENCE TEACHER: I must emphasize the findings of science. You see, life in the final analysis is nothing but a combustion process, an oxidation process.
FRANKL: [Jumping to his feet.] Professor Fritz, if this be the case, what meaning does life have?
COLLEAGUE: He had no answer?
FRANKL: He could not answer because he was a reductionist.
COLLEAGUE: Really?
FRANKL: To be sure, in his case one has not really to deal with an example of reductionism, but ironically with an instance of what he would call “oxidationalism”!
[Pause.]
SCIENCE TEACHER: I must emphasize the findings of science. You see, life in the final analysis is nothing but a combustion process, an oxidation process.
Frankl with hiking friends in the 1930s.
Source: Viktor Frankl Institute, Vienna, Austria.
FRANKL: [Jumping to his feet.] Professor Fritz, if this be the case,
what meaning does life have?
COLLEAGUE: He had no answer?