Fraenkel

­Citas de Viktor Frankel

“A man who let himself decline because he could not
see any future goal found himself occupied with retrospective
thoughts. In a different connection, we have
already spoken of the tendency there was to look into
the past, to help make the present, with all its horrors,
less real. But in robbing the present of its reality there
lay a certain danger. It becameeasy to overlook the
opportunities to make something positive of camp life,
opportunities which really did exist. Regarding our
"provisional existence" as unreal was in itself an
important factor in causing the prisoners to lose their
hold on life; everything in a way became pointless.
Such people forget that often it is just such an exceptionally
difficult external situation which gives manthe
opportunity to grow spiritually beyond himself. Instead
of taking the camp's difficulties as a test of their
inner strength, they did not take their life seriously and
despised it as something of no consequence. They
preferred to close their eyes and to live in the past.
Life for such people became meaningless.
Naturally only a few people were capable of reaching
great spiritualheights. But a few were given the
chance to attain human greatness even through their
apparent worldly failure and death, an accomplishment
which in ordinary circumstances they would
never have achieved. To the others of us, the mediocre
and the half-hearted, the words of Bismarck could be
applied: "Life is like being at the dentist. You always
think that the worst is still to come, and yet it isover
already." Varying this, we could say that most men in
a concentration camp believed that the real opportunities
of life had passed. Yet, in reality, there was an
opportunity and a challenge. One could make a victory
of those experiences turning life into an inner
triumph, or one could ignore the challenge and simply
vegetate, as did a majority of the prisoners.
Any attempt atfighting the camp's psychopathological
influence on the prisoner by psychotherapeutic or
psychohygienic methods had to aim at giving him inner
strength by pointing out to him a future goal to which
he could look forward. Instinctively some of the prisoners
attempted to find one on their own. It is a
peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to
the future - sub specie aeternitatis. Andthis is his
salvation in the most difficult moments of his existence,
although he sometimes has to force his mind to
the task.

The prisoner who had lost faith in the future - his
future - was doomed. With his loss of belief in the
future, he also lost his spiritual hold; he let himself
decline and became subject to mental and physical
decay. Usually this happened quite suddenly, in theform of a crisis, the symptoms of which were familiar
to the experienced camp inmate. We all feared this
moment - not for ourselves, which would have been
pointless, but for our friends. Usually it began with the
prisoner refusing one morning to get dressed and wash
or to go out on the parade grounds. No entreaties, no
blows, no threats had any effect. He just lay there,
hardly moving. Ifthis crisis was brought about by an
illness, he refused to be taken to the sick-bay or to do
anything to help himself. He simply gave up. There he
remained, lying in his own excreta, and nothing bothered
him any more.

I once had a dramatic demonstration of the close
link between the loss of faith in the future and this
dangerous giving up. F----, my senior block warden,
a fairly well-knowncomposer and librettist, confided
in me one day: "I would like to tell you something,
Doctor. I have had a strange dream. A voice told me
that I could wish for something, that I should only say
what I wanted to know, and all my questions would be
answered. What do you think I asked? That I would
like to know when the war would be over for me. You
know what I mean, Doctor - for me! I...