THERE IS A SMALL TOWN IN BAVARIA CALLED LANDSBERG, about fifty kilometers west of Munich. South of it, a road leads to the town of Markt Kaufering, five kilometers away. At the beginning of last year as day was dawning, 280 men marched along this street. The column consisted of rows of five and was escorted by SS soldiers: this was a group of prisoners from the concentration camp in Kaufering. They walked to a nearby forest, where they were to build a concealed munitions factory of enormous proportions. These were ragged, down-and-out figures walking along this street. Walking is the wrong description; they hobbled, they dragged themselves along, in many cases hanging on to each other and supporting one another; their legs, swollen and bulging from hunger edema, could barely support their bodies, weighing, on average, only forty kilograms. Their feet ached, for they were raw, covered in festering pressure sores and ulcerated chilblains. And what was going on in the brains of these men? They thought about the soup that was doled out for their only meal of the day in the evening at the camp, after returning from the work site, and wondered whether, that evening, as well as the watery broth, they would be lucky enough to grab a potato floating in it. And they thought about which group they would be assigned to in the next quarter of an hour when work started: whether they would end up in one of the groups under a dreaded foreman or one of the relatively pleasant ones. And, so, the thoughts of these people revolved around the daily troubles of a concentration camp inmate.

Then one of the men felt that these thoughts were somehow too pointless. And he tried rise above them and think other thoughts, more decent, human concerns. But he was not quite able to do it. Then he used a trick: he tried to distance himself from this whole agonizing life, to get beyond it by looking at it, as they say, from a higher vantage point or from the viewpoint of the future, in the sense of a future theoretical observation. And what did he do? He imagined that he was standing before a lectern at a Viennese adult education college and giving a lecture, and it would be about what he was currently experiencing: in his mind, he gave a lecture entitled “Psychology of the Concentration Camp.”

If you had looked more closely at that man in that group, you would have noticed that he had sewn onto his coat and his trousers small scraps of linen on which a number was visible: 119104. And if you had looked through the Dachau camp records, you would have found that beside this number was written the name of the camp inmate: Frankl Viktor.

Now, for the first time, I would like to really give that lecture in this real hall of this Vienna adult education college, the lecture that this man had given in his mind at that time. Let me tell you about it! That lecture began with the words: In the psychology of the concentration camp we can discern several phases in terms of the psychological reactions of the camp prisoners to life in the camp. The first phase is at the time of the prisoners’ admission to the camp. This is the phase that could be identified and characterized as admission shock. Imagine: the prisoner is delivered off to, let’s say, Auschwitz. If he belonged, as was the case with my transport, to the majority of around 95 percent, then his path would lead from the train station directly to one of the gas chambers; but if he belonged, as by chance I did, to the minority of 5 percent, then his path led first to the disinfection chamber, so into a real . . . shower. Before he can enter the actual shower room, everything that he has with him is taken away, he is only allowed to keep his braces or belt, at best his spectacles or a truss. But no hair is allowed to remain on his body, he is completely shaven. When he is finally standing under the shower, nothing has remained of his whole former life except his literally “naked” existence. And now he reaches the actual point at which he enters the first phase of the experience of the concentration camp: he puts a line through his entire former existence.

No one will be surprised to hear that his next thought concerns the question of how best to commit suicide. In fact, everyone in this situation flirts, if only for a moment, with the idea of “running into the wire,” committing suicide, using the usual method in the camp: contact with the high voltage barbed-wire fence. However, he drops his intention at once, simply because it has become more or less pointless; because a suicide attempt is redundant in this situation inasmuch as the average probability of not, sooner or later, going to the gas chamber is in any case minimal. Who needs to run into the wire when he is going into the gas sooner or later? He no longer needs to wish for the “wire” once he has the “gas” to be afraid of, but he no longer needs to fear the “gas” once he has wished for the “wire.”

When I talk of these things, I always tell of the following experience: On the first morning that we spent in Auschwitz, a colleague of mine, who had arrived a few weeks before us, smuggled himself into our quarters—as newcomers we were all together in a separate hut. He wanted to comfort us and warn us. Above all, he made us understand that we should pay great attention to our appearance; we should strive, at all costs, to give the impression of being fit for work. Even a limp, perhaps for a reason that is trivial in itself—for example, because of ill-fitting shoes—would be enough; an SS man who saw somebody limping would be capable of simply waving them aside and sending them straight to the gas chamber. Only people who were fit for work would be considered fit to live; all the rest would be judged to be unworthy of life, unworthy of survival!

This is why my colleague urged us to shave every day so that, after scraping the skin on our faces with some kind of improvised shaving implement, such as a piece of broken glass, we would look “rosier,” fresher, healthier.

And when he finally inspected our group to see if we all made the right impression of good health and fitness for work, he said reassuringly: “As you stand before me now, you don’t need to be afraid of being sent to the gas chamber for the time being—maybe except one—except you, Frankl. You are not angry with me, are you? But you are the only one who, going on appearance, might currently be considered for selection.” (Selection was the commonly used term in the camp for choosing those who would be sent to the gas chamber with the next batch.) Well, I was not angry with him in the least, because what I felt at that moment was the satisfaction that at least this way I would almost certainly be spared a suicide attempt.

This indifference to one’s own fate then continues further. Increasingly, even within a few days of his imprisonment in the camp, the inmate becomes more and more emotionally numbed. Things that are going on around him affect him less and less. Whereas in the first few days, the sheer abundance of experiences filled with ugliness—hateful in every sense—provoke feelings of horror, outrage, and disgust, these feelings eventually subside, and inner life as a whole is reduced to a minimum; something that for an outsider would be entirely unimaginable. All thought and striving are then restricted to surviving only for today. All spiritual life is likewise reduced to serve this sole interest. In relation to everything else, the soul surrounds itself with a protective shell from which the otherwise harrowing and disturbing impressions will bounce off. This is how the soul protects itself, how it tries to safeguard itself from the overwhelming power threatening to swamp it and tries to preserve its equilibrium—to rescue itself into indifference. In this way, the prisoner progresses into the second phase of his psychological reaction to camp life: the phase that could be characterized as the phase of apathy.

But if your exclusive interest is now self-preservation, preserving the lives of yourself and a few friends, then the inner life of the individual sinks almost to the level of an animal. And if we look more closely we might add, to the level of a herd animal. To verify this, one would have had to observe the behavior of the camp inmates when they formed a marching column, whereby they were mainly concerned with positioning themselves in the middle of the procession and in the middle of a row of five, so that they were not so exposed to the kicks of the guards. Each man’s efforts were primarily directed at not attracting attention, not standing out in any way, but just disappearing into the mass. No wonder, then, if this submerging into the mass led to a “going under,” a decline of the personal sphere. In the camp the human being threatened to become a creature of the masses. On average he became as primitive as a mass creature. His whole driving force became primitive. It became primitive insofar as it was an attitude of compulsion. So, it is easy to understand that psychoanalysts among my colleagues who were with me in the concentration camp spoke in their own terms of a “regression”: regression means the retreat of the psyche to more primitive stages of animal impulse.

In fact, it was possible, by observing the typical dreams of the prisoners, to determine to what primitive wishes they were inwardly giving themselves. So, what did the men mainly dream of in the camp? Always the same: bread, cigarettes, decent ground coffee, and, last but not least, a nice warm bath (and I personally always dreamt of a very particular gateau).

And yet the opinion of my one-sided, psychoanalytically orientated colleagues was fundamentally wrong. It is not true that the experience of the concentration camp drove people to regression out of a fateful necessity and forced them internally to take a step backward. I know of many cases—and even though they are individual ones, they still have fundamental evidential value—in which the people concerned, far from inwardly regressing, instead made inner progress, growing beyond themselves and achieving true human greatness, even in the concentration camp and precisely through their experience of the concentration camp.

Now, other professionals, non-psychoanalysts, have a different interpretation of what happened to people’s mental and spiritual life in the concentration camp. The well-known characterologist Professor [Emil] Utitz, who himself spent several years in a concentration camp, thought he could observe that the character of camp inmates generally developed according to the psychological type that Kretschmer calls the schizoid.¹⁰ This type is characterized by the fact that the afflicted person swings between the affective states of apathy on the one hand and irritability on the other, while the most important other type, characterized by the cycloid temperament,¹¹ is “rejoicing to high heaven” one minute and “in the depths of despair”¹² the next; in other words, he is caught in a permanent cycle of joyful excitement and depressive sadness. This is not the place to go into a specialist discussion of this psychopathological outlook. I would like to limit myself to what is fundamentally important, and that is the conclusion I was able to draw from the identical observation “material,” contrary to Utitz: namely, that the person in the concentration camp is by no means under any external compulsion to get involved in directing his inner development toward becoming the “typical KZler” [concentration camp prisoner] with those (apparent) schizoid tendencies, but that instead he retains a freedom, the human freedom to adapt to his fate, his environment, in one way or another—and indeed there was a “one way or another”! And there were people in the camp, who, for example, were able to overcome their apathy and suppress their irritability, and in the end it was a question of appealing to their ability to “do things differently” and not just the supposed compulsion to “do things this way”! That inner ability, that real human freedom—they could not take that away from the prisoner, even if, in there, they could take everything else away from him and, in fact, did so. This freedom stayed with him, even when the spectacles that they let him keep were smashed to pieces by a punch to the face, and even when one day he was forced to exchange his belt for a piece of bread, so that finally nothing remained of his last few belongings—but that freedom was left in him and it remained with him until his last breath!

Even if a man lapsed into the psychological conformity of the concentration camp, he nevertheless had the freedom to escape the power and influence of that environment and not to be governed by those rules but to resist them, to withdraw from them instead of obeying them blindly. In other words, that man did once possess such freedom; but he had given it away, he had, as it were, renounced its use—voluntarily renounced it! But in so doing he had given himself up, abandoned his self, his very essence. Spiritually, he had let himself fall.

But now we need to ask, when did this deterioration back to type begin, when did this person allow himself to fall spiritually? And our answer must be, Once he had lost his inner hold—as soon as he no longer had an inner hold! Such hold could exist in two forms: either it was a hold on the future or a hold on eternity. The latter was the case with all truly religious people; they did not even need a hold on the future, their future life out there in the free world, after their coming liberation—these people could remain upright irrespective of whether they anticipated a future destiny, or would even experience such a future, or survive the concentration camp. The others, however, were forced to find a hold on their future life, on the content of their life in the future. But it was hard for them to think about the future, their thinking about it could find no reference point, no end point: an end—the end—could not be foreseen. How enviable it seemed to us to be a serious criminal who knew exactly that he had to serve his term of ten years, who could calculate how many days had to pass until the date of his release . . . lucky man! Because all of us in the camp did not have and did not know of a “release date,” and none of us knew when the end would come. This was, according to the unanimous opinion of my comrades, perhaps one of the most spiritually depressing facts of life in the camp! And the recurrent rumors of an imminent end to the war only increased the torment of waiting. For again and again the deadlines had to be postponed. But who could have gone on believing such news? During a full three years I heard repeatedly: in six weeks the war will be over, we will be home again in six weeks at most. The disappointment became ever more bitter and more profound, the expectation more fearful. And what does the Bible say? “Hope deferred makes the heart sick.”¹³ Indeed, it gets sick, so sick that it eventually stops beating. You will understand this when I tell you about the following case: At the beginning of March last year, my former block elder, a Budapest tango composer and librettist for light operas, told me that he had had a strange dream. “Around the middle of February I dreamt,” he said, “thata voice spoke to me and told me I should make a wish, I should ask the voice something I wanted to know; it could answer the question, it could predict my future. And then I asked the voice: ‘When will the war be over for me, do you understand? For me: so when will we be liberated by the advancing American troops?’” “And what answer did the voice give you?” Then he leaned toward me and whispered secretively in my ear: “On the 30th of March!” In mid-March I was admitted to the infirmary hut with typhus. On April 1st I was released from there and returned to my earthen hut: “Where is the block elder?” I asked, and what did I discover? Toward the end of March, when the date predicted by the voice in his dream had moved ever closer without the military situation seeming to keep up with it, our block elder had become increasingly depressed. On the 29th of March he started running a high temperature. On the 30th of March, the day the war was to end “for him,” he lost consciousness. On the 31st of March he was dead. He had died of typhus.

So you can see that spiritual and mental decline due to losing one’s inner hold, especially due to the loss of a hold on the future, also leads to physical decline. Now let us ask ourselves whether there was any therapy for this mental, spiritual, and physical decline: whether one could have done anything about it—and what? I can only give you this answer: there was a therapy, but it is clear that, from the outset, it had to be confined to the psychological so that it could only be a psychotherapy. And within such psychotherapy, of course, it was primarily a matter of providing a spiritual hold, of giving life content. Thinking of the words of Nietzsche who once said, “Whoever has a why to live can bear almost any how”—a “why,” that is part of the content of life, and the “how,” those were the conditions of life that made camp life so difficult that it only became bearable with regard to a “why,” a wherefore. So if there was basically nothing other than psychotherapy to enable people to endure the camp, then this psychotherapy was already defined in a particular sense, since it needed to endeavor to convince the person who was being asked to muster the will to survive that this survival had meaning. In addition, the psychotherapeutic task, which in the camp was truly the task of caring for the inmates’ souls, was made more difficult because we were dealing with people who, in general, on average, could not count on surviving! What could you have said to them? And one should have said something to them in particular. And hence this situation became the experimentum crucis for that psychotherapeutic care.¹⁴

I have already said in the previous part that not only life itself but also the suffering involved has a meaning, and in fact a meaning that is so unconditional that it can be fulfilled even where the suffering does not lead to outward success, where it looks as though the suffering was in vain. And it was mainly such suffering that we had to deal with in the concentration camps. But what ought I have said to these people who were lying next to me in the barracks and knew pretty accurately that they would die and how soon they would die? They knew as well as I did that no life, no person, and no task (remember the double case that I told you about in the first part¹⁵) would be waiting for them, or that it would be waiting in vain. . . . So, as well as the meaning of living, of survival, it was also important to point out the meaning of suffering and of suffering in vain—indeed, much more than this—even to reveal the meaning that may be latent in death! A death, of course, that could have been more meaningful only in the sense of Rilke’s maxim of which we spoke last time, and which said that each person should die his or her own death. It was essential that we should die a death of our own and not the death that the SS had forced on us! We bear responsibility for this task just as we bear responsibility for the task of life. Responsibility? To whom, to which higher authority? And who would be allowed to answer this question for anyone else? Does not everyone have to decide this ultimate question for himself? What does it matter if maybe one man in the barracks felt responsible to his conscience and another to his God and a third to a person who was now far away? Each one of them knew that somehow, somewhere, someone was there, unseen, watching over him, who demanded of him that he would be “worthy of his sufferings,” as Dostoevsky once said, and expected of him that he should “die his own death.” Each of us felt this expectation at that time when death was near, and we felt it all the more the less we felt that we ourselves could still expect anything from life, that someone or something was still waiting for us at all, and that we might expect to survive at all.

Many of you who have not lived through the concentration camp will be astonished and will ask me how a human being can endure all the things I have been talking about. I assure you, the person who has experienced and survived all of that is even more amazed than you are! But do not forget this: the human psyche seems to behave in some ways like a vaulted arch—an arch that has become dilapidated can be supported by placing an extra load on it. The human soul also appears to be strengthened by experiencing a burden (at least to a particular degree and within certain limits). This is how, and this is the only way we can understand it, many a weakling was able to leave the concentration camp in a better, stronger state of mind, as it were, than when he had entered it. At the same time, however, we now understand that the liberation, the release from the camp, the sudden release of the prisoner from the intense pressure he has been under all that time, in turn endangers his psyche. I use caisson disease, or decompression sickness, for comparison in this context. It affects divers who work underwater under high atmospheric pressure and should never suddenly be returned to normal air pressure, but only gradually, because otherwise they suffer the most serious physical consequences.

However, this also anticipates our discussion of the third and final phase within the psychology of the concentration camp, the psychology of the liberated inmate. The most important thing I want to say regarding him concerns something that will, no doubt, greatly astonish you: it is the fact that it takes many days before the liberated person is able to enjoy his liberation. He must actually and literally relearn how to be happy. And sometimes he has to hurry to learn this, because often he will soon need to unlearn it again and must learn to suffer again. I would like to say a little about that now.

Imagine that the man liberated from the concentration camp returns, comes home. Then he may be met with some kind of a shrug of the shoulders. And above all, he will always hear two phrases from other people: “We did not know anything about it,” and “We also suffered.” Let us start with the second statement and ask ourselves first whether human suffering can be measured or assessed in such a way that the suffering of one person can be compared to the suffering of another. And I would like to say about this that the suffering of human beings is incommensurable! Real suffering fills a person completely, fills their whole being.

I once talked to a friend about my experiences in the concentration camp; he himself had not been in a camp, he had “merely” fought at Stalingrad. And the man felt, as he said, somehow ashamed when compared with me. He did not need to be. There is indeed an essential difference between what a man experiences in battle and what he experiences in a concentration camp. In battle, he faces nothingness, he stares death in the face, but in the camp we ourselves were nothing, we were already dead during our lifetime. We were worth nothing. We did not only see nothingness, that is what we were. Our life counted for nothing; our death counted for nothing. There was no halo, not even a notional one, around our death. It was the departure of a small nothing into the vast nothingness. And this death was also barely noticed. We had already “lived” it long in advance!

And what would have happened if I had died in the camp? On the parade ground the next morning, someone in one of the rows of five, outwardly unmoved—standing there as usual with his face buried in his open coat collar against the frost, and his shoulders hunched—would have mumbled to the man next to him: “Frankl died yesterday,” and at most this man would have murmured, “Hmm.”

And in spite of everything, no human suffering can be compared to anyone else’s because it is part of the nature of suffering that it is the suffering of a particular person, that it is his or her own suffering—that its “magnitude” is dependent solely on the sufferer, that is, on the person; a person’s solitary suffering is just as unique and individual as is every person.

Therefore, it would be pointless to speak of differences in the magnitude of suffering; but a difference that truly matters is that between meaningful and meaningless suffering. But—and I think you will have gathered this sufficiently from previous lectures—this difference depends entirely on the individual human being: the individual, and only that individual, determines whether their suffering is meaningful or not. And what about the suffering of those people who, as we have heard, so strongly declare that they “also suffered,” and they “had known of nothing”? You see, it is precisely this claim to having known nothing that, in my opinion, is so well suited to making meaningless the fact of having suffered. And why? Because it comes from an ethical misunderstanding of the situation. A misunderstanding that we will now address, not because I want to bring the politics of the day into the debate, but because I think it is necessary to augment the “metaphysics of everyday life” that we have concerned ourselves with so far, by adding an “ethics of everyday life.”

We spoke earlier about the “why” of not-knowing, and said it was a misunderstanding; but if we ask about the cause of this misunderstanding, then we may discover that this “not-knowing” is in fact a “not wanting to know.” What lies behind it is wanting to escape responsibility. However, the average person today is in fact being driven to flee responsibility. What is driving him to this flight is the fear of having to accept collective guilt. He will be declared guilty on all counts, complicit in things he has not done himself, indeed, things of which, in many cases, he actually “knew nothing.” Should the decent person really be held accountable for the offenses of others, even if the offenders belong to the same nation? Was he, this decent man, not himself the victim of an offense, the object of a terror that was carried out by a ruling, leading class of his own people without him being able to stand up against the terror? Did he not suffer under it himself? Would not the establishment of a collective guilt be a relapse into exactly that worldview that we want to combat? That worldview that declares an individual guilty because others from the same group to which he happens to belong have actually or allegedly committed some kind of offense? And how ridiculous this outlook seems to us today—finally! Holding someone to account because of their nationality, native language, or place of birth must seem as ridiculous to us today as making them responsible for their own height. If a criminal who is 1.64 meters tall is arrested, should I also be hanged because I happen to be the same height?

But here we have to make an important distinction: we have to differentiate between collective guilt and collective liability. If I illustrate this with an allegorical example, you will understand me immediately. If I suddenly get appendicitis, is it my fault? Certainly not; and yet, if I have to have an operation, what then? I will nevertheless owe the fee for the operation to the doctor who operated on me. That is, I am “liable” for the settlement of the doctor’s bill. So “liability without guilt” definitely exists. And it is a similar situation now with the collective of people who were collectively freed from terror. They could not liberate themselves; other collectives, other freedom-loving nations had to step in, join the battle, and sacrifice their best people, their youth, to liberate a nation that was powerless against its own leadership, from those leaders. This powerlessness had nothing to do with guilt. But would it be unfair, unjust, to have to pay for this liberation with some kind of sacrifice and to feel jointly liable, even if you were not complicit and knew you were not guilty?

If you want to understand the last chapter of this psychology, you would have had to accompany me at sunset on that spring evening last year, after the liberation of the Turkheim concentration camp, when I went alone into the woodland near the camp. There, on the highly illegal order of our camp commander, the comrades who had died in the camp were buried (the commander was the SS man who I mentioned in the first part who had paid for medicines for “his” camp prisoners out of his own pocket). During the burial, contrary to the orders this man had received, he did not neglect to ensure that, after removing slivers of bark from the slender trunks of the young fir trees that stood behind the mass graves, the names of the dead were inconspicuously scrawled there in indelible pencil. If you had been with me then, you would have sworn with me to ensure that the continuing life of us survivors would absolve the guilt of all of us—yes, the guilt of all of us! Because we survivors knew very well that the best among us in the camp did not come out, it was the best who did not return! So we could not perceive our survival as anything other than undeserved mercy. To earn it later, to earn it retrospectively and be halfway worthy of it, that, we felt, we owed our dead comrades. It only seemed possible to settle this guilt by shaking up and keeping alert the consciences of others as well as our own.

True enough, what became of the liberated man after such an experience, when he returned home, only too often made him forget that oath. However, there are moments in his life—and those are the significant ones—in which he fulfills what he once swore to himself: to bless the smallest piece of bread, the fact that he can sleep in a bed, that he does not have to stand for roll call or live in constant danger of death. Everything becomes relative for him and so does every misfortune. As we said, he who was literally nothing feels literally born again, but not as the person he was but as the essence of himself. In the first part I pointed out how everything extraneous to his person was “melted down.” Not much of his ambition will have been left either. What may have lasted can at most be a yearning to achieve a far higher form of yearning, the urge for self-realization—only in its most essential form.

As you no doubt realize, we have, at the same time, reached the end of this topic and the limits of our discussion. No talking, no lectures can help us get any further—there is only one thing left for us to do: to act; namely, to act in our everyday lives.

We were just talking about everyday life; yes, even the phrase “metaphysics of everyday life” came up. I hope that you now understand this expression correctly: it was not enough to make transparent the everyday—which is only apparently so gray, banal, and commonplace—so that we can look through it into the eternal; but in the final analysis it was necessary to point out that the eternal refers back to the temporal—to the temporal, the everyday, and the point of an ongoing encounter between the finite and the infinite. What we create, experience, and suffer, in this time, we create, experience, and suffer for all eternity. As far as we bear responsibility for an event, as far as it is “history,” our responsibility, it is incredibly burdened by the fact that something that has happened cannot be “taken out of the world.” However, at the same time, an appeal is made to our responsibility—precisely to bring what has not yet happened into the world! And each of us must do this as part of our daily work, as part of our everyday lives. So everyday life becomes the reality per se, and this reality becomes the potential for action. And so, the “metaphysics of everyday life” only at first leads us out of everyday life, but then—consciously and responsibly—it leads us back into everyday life.

What leads us forward and helps us along the way, what has guided and is guiding us, is a joy in taking responsibility. But to what extent is the average person happy to take on responsibility?

Responsibility is something one is both “drawn to” and “withdraws from.” This wisdom in the language indicates that there are opposing forces in human beings that prevent them from taking responsibility. And indeed, there is something unfathomable about responsibility: the longer and the more deeply we look into it, the more we become aware of it, until finally we are seized by a kind of dizziness. If we delve into the nature of human responsibility, we recoil: there is something terrible about the responsibility of a human being—and at the same time something glorious!

It is terrible to know that at every moment I bear responsibility for the next; that every decision, from the smallest to the largest, is a decision “for all eternity”; that in every moment I can actualize the possibility of a moment, of that particular moment, or forfeit it. Every single moment contains thousands of possibilities—and I can only choose one of them to actualize it. But in making the choice, I have condemned all the others and sentenced them to “never being,” and even this is for all eternity! But it is wonderful to know that the future—my own future and with it the future of the things, the people around me—is somehow, albeit to a very small extent, dependent on my decisions in every moment. Everything I realize through them, or “bring into the world,” as we have said, I save into reality and thus protect from transience.

But on average, people are too sluggish to shoulder their responsibilities. And this is where education for responsibility begins. Certainly, the burden is heavy, it is difficult not only to recognize responsibility but also to commit to it. To say yes to it, and to life. But there have been people who have said yes despite all difficulties. And when the inmates in the Buchenwald concentration camp sang in their song, “We still want to say yes to life,” they did not only sing about it but also achieved it many times—they and many of us in the other camps as well. And they achieved it under unspeakable conditions, external and internal conditions that we have already spoken enough about today. So shouldn’t we all be able to achieve it today in, after all, incomparably milder circumstances? To say yes to life is not only meaningful under all circumstances—because life itself is—but it is also possible under all circumstances.

And ultimately that was the entire purpose of these three parts: to show you that people can still—despite hardship and death (first part), despite suffering from physical or mental illness (second part) or under the fate of the concentration camp (third part)—say yes to life in spite of everything.