B. Dus, How Do You View Lewe?
Nooit het die bodem van bitterheid en woede is so vrugbaar en dan op die terrein van die Nazi-konsentrasiekampe in die Tweede Wêreldoorlog. Maar, women and children who were deemed undesirable by Hitler’s maniacal regime were shipped far from their homes on railway boxcars like human livestock to compounds built on humiliation, torture, degradation and usually death. Starvation was the rule rather than the exception.
The few who survived physical death nevertheless left those camps mentally scarred. For many, the experience changed their attitude irrevocably from happy, prosperous members of society to virtual skeletons, gnawing on the bones of resentment and hostility for the rest of their days. It’s certainly understandable how a person could witness such human depravity and change their life attitude.
For Victor Frankl, attitude always remained a matter of unchangeable direction — a direction that always pointed to a bright outlook on reality and the human condition.
A noted Austrian therapist and physician, Frankl’s sedate life crumbled one autumn day in 1942 when the SS snatched him and his wife and parents away to the Theresienstadt concentration camp.
Even as he endured torment after torment — watching his parents and wife waste away and die as they were moved from camp to camp — Frankl never lost his therapist’s ability to observe and define human behavior.
While working as a camp counselor and medical technician, Frankl noticed that inmates tended to exhibit one of two attitudes — they would either give in to despair or they would choose to live a life of meaning despite the beatings, lack of food and outright brutality of their captors.
Frankl writes:
“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.” [1]
In short, our attitude is the one thing we possess that can never be regulated, taxed, stolen or conned from us — unless we allow it.
[1] Frankl, Victor: Man's Search for Meaning, Washington Square Press, 1984
