Viktor Frankl

  b. 1905; d. 1997 | Austrian psychiatrist

At The Bottom

— 1944

The train had arrived at Auschwitz.

Viktor Frankl, a 39-year-old psychiatrist from Vienna, was one of 1500 people — mostly Jews like himself — being transported by train to an unknown destination.  Each car was packed with prisoners, stuffed so full that the grey dawn was visible only through the tops of the windows.  No one knew where the train was heading.  Most expected it would carry them to a German munitions factory, where they would be employed as slave laborers for Adolf Hitler’s war machine.  The whistle of the engine, Frankl recalled, sounded “like a cry for help in commiseration for the unhappy load which it was destined to lead into perdition.” At last, the train slowed, and someone in the car spied a sign that caused hearts to stop beating.  The train had arrived at Auschwitz.  Prior to the war, Viktor Frankl had been a successful psychiatrist in Vienna, where he treated patients with severe depression and suicidal tendencies.  Now, however, he was simply a number, just one of millions of Jews herded into a concentration camp.  At Auschwitz, the odds of surviving the first few hours were small, as the vast majority of prisoners were immediately sent to the gas chambers.  Those who were not killed on the first day could expect to become slave laborers, enduring starvation and disease as long as their bodies could sustain them.