The last of human freedoms – the ability to choose one’s attitude in a given set of circumstances. Victor Frankl (1905-1997), Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, founder of logotherapy, a psychotherapeutic method of finding meaning in all forms of existence.
Imagine for a minute you were suddenly snatched away from your world of comfort…your house, your friends, your family and even your country. Then you were stripped of all your personal belongings right down to the gold and silver fillings that protected your teeth. Now naked and debased, you are subjected to inhumane conditions of existence, tossed in a bunkhouse overflowing with decrepit human specimens who have become mere fragments of their former selves.
Think of your new existence where comfort food is a distant memory and the closest coffee house rendered but a dream…your daily sustenance consists of what you might call “soup” and a morsel of bread that previously you would have discarded into the trash as something too trivial to even consider significant! Now turn down the heat and throw on the least insulated clothing you could find and slap on somebody else’s 20 year old hand-me-down shoes! Oh and by the way, there is definitely no sleeping in or getting sick because that will cost you your life!
Before you get to work you will be awakened in the middle of the deepest sleep only to be mentally and physically degraded so that by the time you even show up to work you really have nothing left mentally. Now in the bitter cold pick up the clearly inadequate tools of your trade and begin the hardest labor that you can think of…a work load that would have modern day human rights activists up in arms pulling the alarm!
