Mitchell Loughlin’s Reviews > Man's Search for Meaning > Status Update

Many tried to encourage there downtrodden companions through establish why life still had expectations upon them. May it be raising there child or finishing there great works.

Victor occasionally tried to retreats into a clinical analysis of his condition “ emotion, which is suffering ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it”. This being his why, he shared with his fellows

“It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future”
“He who has a why to live can live with almost any how”

Around the time of Christmas the death toll sky rocketed. The work was not deemed to be any higher but in the minds of the prisoners who believed they would be home by Christmas, their sense of why was gone. Suicides were strictly prohibited from being interfered with, instead

The opportunity for death was ample, but through sticking to his constitution, his purpose of friendship and finding positive moments fate guided him through the suffering

When men were chosen to leave for a cushy camp two days later the men that were left behind were liberated. It was learned that the men who were transferred were burned alive in a barn hours after leaving.

When he left Auschwitz, he learned that one day later, the men had begun to turn into cannibalism. He had chosen to leave when he could have stayed, but he wanted to stay with friends again.

Death in typhean: a story that Victor referenced a lot.

A homeowner returns home and hears a servant’s tale, he has seen death and that he needs to borrow a car to flea as fast as possible so that he will not perish. The homeowner agrees and soon encounters Death questioning him “Why he scared the man so.” Death replied that he did not intend to, but he was surprised to have not encountered him on the road

Suffering is described as being akin to gas. It will fill the body it is contained in. Things always seem as if the worst is yet to come though it may have already passed. Through that suffering a person has the opportunity to forge it into something new. A purpose. Whether that purpose be surviving to see you’re beloved or find so sort of normality. But the same suffering may lead man to baser instincts

Four days sick, lying among the stench of the dying was a respite from the snow and work. Envy of others jobs was met with jokes of “atleast in not doing this”

He talks about love, how when it is deep it goes beyond the body of your beloved. How the absence of knowledge of his wife was excruciating but did not alter his feelings. He would pretend to talk with her when things got hard

Victor discussed some of the tribulations Jews would face in the camps, relating them to his personal or shared experiences. He shared these stories not to expose tyranny or cole that suffering exists but to forward his thesis. Moments that could be viewed only as suffering he shaded with camaraderie. On a long march through a slushy rain, holding the arm of a fellow for support the two men think about their wives

Most of the prisoners were given a uniform of rags which would have made a scarecrow, elegant by comparison

The prisoner of Auschwitz in the first phase of shock did not fear death. Even the gas chambers lost their horse for him after the first few days after all, they spared him from the active committing suicide.

At that moment, I became intensely conscious of the fact that no dream no matter how horrible could be as bad as the reality of the camp which surrounded us

Instead, he playfully picked up a stone and threw it at me that to me seemed the way to attract the attention of a beast to call a domestic animal back to a job a creature would you have so little in common that you do not punish it