THE BOOK FAIR

Review:

Dr. Viktor Frankl’s book of his experience in the death camps is not to relate his own personal trauma, but rather to convey the psychological effects of the brutality the victims suffered.

Dr. Frankl breaks down the emotional stages the prisoners encountered.  The shock of one’s situation, the loss of home and family, and the fear for loved ones, is the first conditioning.  Second is apathy, after experiencing an overload of emotions to intolerable surroundings, death, starvation, torture, disease, with no end in sight.  The third stage is the coating of one’s self, in a shell for survival.

Working both for and against the victims is the fear of the worst, the hope of survival and the search for a reprieve.

Dr. Frankl writes of his first encounter at Auschwitz, his desperation to keep important papers and the intensity of the moment in understanding he could not, with the realization that the life he knew was no more.  He remembers the SS officer he passed in a long line of others, who with no emotion effortlessly pointed his finger to the right or to the left.  Viktor Frankl did not realize at the moment, that one line meant death, and the other line meant life.

Prisoners had numbers forcibly tattooed on their arms.  Dr. Frankl explains in detail the psychological leveling of a person when reduced to a number.  Such degradation leaves only a shadow of the former person.  Coupled with the horrors of the camp, only the instinct to survive remains alive.

Dr. Frankl tells of the loss of his wife, separated from him at the camp, who turned 24 years old on his second night in Auschwitz. 

Dr. Frankl offers an explanation in the saddest terms, that the struggle to survive is so complete that at times, it is the only impulse left.

He gives the example that on a particularly cold morning, a fellow prisoner could not fit his terribly swollen feet into his shoes, and so the normally strong man burst into tears, terrified he would now trudge the snow while working barefoot.  Dr. Frankl writes that during that episode, he ate a small crust of bread from his pocket and his concentration was on how delicious it tasted.

Life’s ambition became to evade bad guards and acquire a little food.  Dr. Frankl carries the guilt of many survivors, believing that the best of the men, were those lost.

Dr. Frankl does offer hope believing that one can keep his humanity and survive the worst, recounting that there were instances, in the most trying times, of kindness.

Dr. Frankl is the pioneer of Logotherapy, which focuses on the future that a patient can have, and positive experiences to come, rather than unhappy events from the patient’s past, which allows the patient no control.