Choose This Day
Victor Frankl was a Jewish neurologist who lived through the Holocaust. To try to save his family and his life, it looks like he did some unethical experimentation on other Jews for the Nazis, but he and his family were eventually imprisoned anyway. His wife and immediate family all died; he survived alone. Frankl was a neurologist and psychologist, a doctor, and while he was in the concentration camps, he observed the people around him. He wanted to know what psychological factors make the difference between life and death when people are at the very limits of pain and suffering. He wrote a book about his experience and his observations, Man's Search for Meaning . He concluded that no matter how much someone suffered, the difference between life and death was whether someone had a purpose for living. Whether someone was living for the day when they could take revenge on the Nazis or whether someone hoped they could somehow lighten someone else's suffering, having a wh