In the Death Camps
Story★★★Nazi Death Camp survivor Viktor E. Frankl spoke of the need for solitude experienced by prisoners in the Nazi camps: “There were times, of course, when it was possible, and even necessary, to keep away from the crowd.
It is well known that an enforced community life, in which attention is paid to everything one does all the time, may result in an irresistible urge to get away, at least for a short while. The prisoner craved to be alone with himself and his thoughts. He yearned for privacy and for solitude. After my transportation to a so-called “rest camp,” I had the rare fortune to find solitude for about five minutes at a time.
Behind the earthen hut where I worked and in which were crowded about fifty delirious patients, there was a quiet spot in a corner of the double fence of barbed wire surrounding the camp. A tent had been improvised there with a few poles and branches of trees in order to shelter a half-dozen corpses (the daily death rate in the camp). There was also a shaft leading to the water pipes. I squatted on the wooden lid of this shaft whenever my services were not needed.
I just sat and looked out at the green flowering slopes and the distant blue hills of the Bavarian landscape, framed by the meshes of barbed wire. . . . “The corpses near me, crawling with lice, did not bother me.
Only the steps of passing guards could rouse me from my dreams. . . .”-Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (New York: Washington Square Press, 1959), 71-72.
2Vikcor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning (New York: Washington Square Press, 1959), 71-72.
The point
Concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl described the desperate human craving for solitude even amid unimaginable suffering and death.