Man's search for meaning

[Spartan]

Sounds like an interesting good read. 

Has anyone heard of it ? 

I think it's about victor frankyls experience in the concentration camps world ear 2 and how he created meaning and purpose from his suffering etc 

He created a therapy called logo therapy.. 

 

[brake]

I read some books and watched some documentaries on world war 2 and the Holocaust but the best were the stories from my grandparents and great grandparents who actually lived through it. It was terrible as you can imagine but I feel like that generation was stronger because they didn't seem as traumatized as I feel like our generation would be. But who knows? My great grandfather was actually in Auschwitz and survived it. Nazis actually shot his rebel friends as they were trying to escape. He didn't escape so they sent him to Auschwitz. Terrible times. I never read any of Victor's stuff. I know a lot of people that died from drugs though, very sad. And yes there were a lot of people in concentration camps who were not Jewish.

Edited Sunday at 04:39 PM by brake

[yarkadin]

Jews were hit the hardest in Nazi camps, of course, but Poles, Gypsies and other ethnicities were also enslaved and crushed... and Russians paid the greatest sacrifice.  My grandfather was a radio operator in WWII fighting in the Soviet Union.  He would always tell me... if he met Adolf Hitler, he would have murdered him.  I think he was pretty sincere about it, too!  Though he was never a violent man, at least not in my lifetime and from the stories I've been told... always treated me well.

Anyway, that sounds like a good read.  I read Froid a long, long time ago... Frankl appears to be an intellectual successor of the same Viennese school. 

I agree with Brake... in some ways, for some reason(s), I have a greater tendency to listen and take seriously the older generations than I do the newer ones... maybe not the majority of boomers, but among them, given the fact they haven't been raised with the internet and all of the stupidity and wasteland of toxicity and false information that the current generations live with... gives them somehow more currency in seriousness to me, I don't know... always prepared to be disproven.

[cosmiccharlie]

I read Frankyl's book earlier this year and found it exceptional.  It's roughly broken into two parts.  The first half is a general description of what life in a concentration camp is like from the perspective of a prisoner.  The second half attempts to provide psychoanalysis of the experience.  One takeaway for me was that it seems within such experiences, when one is stripped of every aspect of humanity and identity and left only with the experience of being alive some find a deep spiritual awakening in this place.  He specifically mentions that this doesn't happen to everyone and I imagine it strongly depends upon a persons physical condition and the extend of the torment they endure.  But he does very eloquently describe working forced labor in Auschwitz , in the bitter cold, desperately hungry but in his mind completely consumed with love for his dead wife.  I found it a very inspiring and thought provoking book but it is quite heavy due to the subject matter.