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EP 165 A voice gave him a date.

In Auschwitz, a man told Viktor Frankl about a dream.

A voice had said he could ask one question, so he asked the only one that mattered: when would the war be over for him. Not for everyone. For him. The voice gave him a date.

He believed it completely.

I have not been able to stop thinking about what happened to him on that date. It changed how I understand what we are really doing when we call ourselves creators.

Resources from the Episode: 

 

AI-GENERATED TRANSCRIPT

Episode 165: Viktor Frankl

Introduction

AUDREY: Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Audrey Rindlisbacher, author of The Mission Driven Life and founder of The Mission Driven Mom. Thank you for joining me today. I'm excited to talk to you about Viktor Frankl, a personal hero of mine. Just imagine that you're a Jew in Vienna during World War II. You've fallen in love with the woman of your dreams and you want to be married, but the law has just changed, and you are the very last Jewish couple in Vienna awarded the privilege of marrying. Not long after, your beautiful wife becomes pregnant, but no Jews are allowed to have children. And so she is forced to abort it.

AUDREY: These were some of the things Viktor Frankl went through. I'm not going to go through every detail of his life, but he's worth looking up and learning all about. Today I want to do something really special with him and his experiences.

AUDREY: We can see components of the Mission Driven Life in these stories and events and excerpts from his life. He had that love of God. He lived according to principle. He loved truth and talked about it often. He took good care of himself, loved others, loved humanity, made a huge impact in the world, heard the call, adopted meaning in his life, and shared logotherapy with the world. So definitely a mission driven life worth celebrating, and an incredible man who I greatly admire.

Narrowing the Focus

AUDREY: But for today, I want to focus our conversation a little more narrowly. I'm going to tell you a bit about his life leading up to World War II, and then I'm going to take you into his most famous book, Man's Search for Meaning. If you have not read this book, you really, really need to. The first half is recollections and excerpts from his experiences in the concentration camp. Nothing vulgar or offensive, but very thought provoking. He's trying to look at it from a psychological point of view, through the experiences of the prisoner. The second half is about his logotherapy, which is a fascinating read.

AUDREY: The reason we're going into that book is to do something very unique. This fall, as I've mentioned on the podcast before, we're going to gather in the beautiful mountains of Utah and spend a day at our MDM celebration working through our theme for this year, Mothers of Creation. We're going to talk about how we show up as victims in the world, in our own drama, how we sometimes create it for ourselves or react to circumstances outside our control. We build these problem stories. We're going to break those apart. We're going to learn how to disengage. We're going to talk about what creation means and what it means to be a creator. And then we're going to teach you how to reframe it, how to turn it into new purpose and vision for your life, and how to create a creator statement.

AUDREY: There's a community in the MDM Academy specifically for this event that women are welcome into as soon as they sign up, and that's been going well. Our brilliant Lindsey Wright has been running trainings in there. We did the first one together, and they're recorded. It's been a beautiful experience to watch women start to learn these ideas and prepare for this day-long event. So with all of that in mind, I want to show you three core concepts we're talking about on the podcast right now, and how they come to life in Viktor Frankl's book. Drama and victimhood and victim roles. Creation and creators. And vision, and why vision matters so much and how it's incorporated into these other aspects of our lives.

A Little About Viktor Frankl

AUDREY: He was born in 1905 in Vienna, the middle child in a Jewish family. When he was little, World War I hit, and it hit his family hard, like it did so many others. They were in abject poverty. They struggled to survive. And what's fascinating about Viktor is that by the age of three, he knew he wanted to be a doctor. Isn't that something? He went along that vein, thinking and learning in terms of what it means to make people whole, what it means to heal them. By the time he got into high school, he was actively studying psychology and philosophy, some in school and some out of it. So it might not surprise you that at age sixteen, he gave a speech in school entitled On the Meaning of Life. These ideas were already part of his message, his mission to the world. He felt it at a very early age, and that idea of meaning and purpose never left him. It was a central theme in his life.

AUDREY: As a teenager, he also wrote to Freud. I don't know that they exchanged many letters, but Freud remembered him and remembered the correspondence when they met a few years later. He later disagreed with Freud and left off following him, but always deeply respected him. He then went on to medical school. During that time, he started to notice a disturbing trend. As exams approached, there was always a percentage of high school students every year who would end up taking their own lives, either leading up to the exams or after they received their scores, because these were so vital. They would literally determine the trajectory of that student's life. And they were young, and didn't always have the foresight to understand that things can change, that life could be different and better. So they became very fatalistic. He noticed this. He was disturbed by it. He decided to do something about it. He started treating these students with therapies and other modalities, and the first year he did this, there were no suicides. It was the first time in a long time that had been the case, and that was very rewarding for him.

AUDREY: So he continued on. He finished school, and by the age of twenty-eight or twenty-nine, in 1933, he was already the head of the Vienna Psychiatric Hospital for female suicide prevention. He had seen the need, he had reached out, and as he did that, he really started to make a difference in this area. He learned a lot in the process. He went on and took other top positions. And by the time World War II was approaching, it hit Vienna earlier than it did the United States. Even as it approached, he could see that as a Jew he was in a lot of trouble. There were already more laws and discriminations put in place. So he applied for a visa to the United States. It was done by lottery, so he just had to wait it out. His number came up, and he was actually awarded a visa to go to the United States.

The Stone on the Floor

AUDREY: But he knew his family didn't qualify. He would be the only one going, leaving his family behind. He didn't know what he should do. So he decided to leave the decision up to a power higher than himself. He prayed and waited for some kind of sign. One day he was at home and found a little stone on the floor. When he lifted it up, he realized it was a piece of a Ten Commandments tablet that had been shattered when a synagogue was bombed, and his father had brought it home. It was a section of the honor your father and mother commandment. He saw that as divine intervention, and that he needed to stay with his family. So he decided to do that, which is why he was still there when the war reached him.

AUDREY: He met his wife, Tilly. They fell in love. She was an incredible woman of compassion and intelligence, and they connected very deeply. As I said earlier, they were the last couple awarded the opportunity to marry, in 1941. In 1942 she became pregnant, and it was a forced abortion, because if a Jewish couple was known to be pregnant, they would be sent immediately to the concentration camps.

AUDREY: So she had that forced abortion. Not long after, in 1942 or maybe 1943, the family was transferred to a milder concentration camp. At the beginning they were together. Frankl's father was old and very sick. Frankl was able to smuggle some morphine into the camp and give it to his father just before he passed away, and he was very grateful he could do that. Through a series of complications, he wound up in Auschwitz. His wife was going to follow him there. She ended up at Bergen-Belsen, where she was, I believe, almost immediately killed. He didn't know that at the time. And so he served out his time in Auschwitz until the war ended.

Into the Book

AUDREY: That brings us to this book. After the war, he dictated it in just nine days. He first published it anonymously, because he didn't feel he should take credit for it. He didn't know it would do any good or make any difference. He just felt it needed to be said. And it had a huge impact. It became his most famous work and has sold more than twelve million copies in print worldwide. So a very, very important work.

AUDREY: I'm going to take you on a journey, from victim to creator to having vision, through some different excerpts. He says here:

"The camp inmate was frightened of making decisions and of taking any sort of initiative whatsoever. This was the result of a strong feeling that fate was one's master, and that one must not try to influence it in any way, but instead let it take its own course. The prisoner would have preferred to let fate make the choice for him. This escape from commitment was most apparent when a prisoner had to make the decision for or against an escape attempt."

AUDREY: That phrase, escape from commitment, is so fascinating. Of course, we know these are true victims. They really are victims. They are in a concentration camp being tortured, not having anything to eat, doing hard labor every day. They are, in the truest sense of the word, complete victims. And yet there is this space Frankl creates for us, where he helps us understand that even when you are genuinely a victim, victimhood is a mindset. It's a choice. It's a choice we can choose out of. That's what we're talking about this summer and this fall. We all have hard things happening to us. We all feel like victims to someone else's choices, to life circumstances, to illnesses or disabilities we can't change, to financial circumstances. We all could act the victim. We all could fall into victimhood. We all could run away from responsibility and commitment, just like the prisoners in the camps wanted to. He says:

"That which was ultimately responsible for the state of the prisoner's inner self was not so much the enumerated psychological causes as it was the result of a free decision."

AUDREY: Let me help you understand that again. The ultimate responsibility for the state of the prisoner's inner self. He couldn't control the circumstances around him at all. One hundred percent, other people were in control. But he makes this distinction: we may be a victim externally, but we don't have to be a victim internally. We don't have to choose it. That inner state is a choice. Like he says here:

"Psychological observations of the prisoners have shown that only the men who allowed their inner hold on their moral and spiritual selves to subside eventually fell victim to the camp's degenerating influences. The question now arises, what could or should have constituted this inner hold?"

AUDREY: So how do they go about taking hold of their inner selves, being true victims but not being in drama, not being in victimhood, choosing their inner state? He also talks about a man who let himself decline because he could not see any future goal, and found himself occupied with retrospective thoughts. That's our first hint into how we choose not to think or act like a victim.

AUDREY: He shares something else here, probably the most famous quote from the book, if not the most famous. He says:

"We can answer these questions from experience as well as on principle. The experiences of camp life show that man does have a choice of action. There were enough examples, often of a heroic nature, which proved that apathy could be overcome, irritability suppressed. Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress."

AUDREY: What's amazing about this is that only someone like Frankl could say it definitively, because he was there, because he experienced it, because he saw it firsthand. He has the power and the ability to tell all of us: no one has an excuse. If you will learn to recognize when you are thinking like a victim, feeling like a victim, acting like a victim in your life, when you are responding to life without choice, without responsibility, then you can make a change. You can make a shift. He goes on:

"We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms, to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."

AUDREY: So he's saying yes, we sometimes are victims. Sometimes genuinely victims, sometimes just making up the drama in our own minds. I have done that millions of times. But even when we're genuinely victims, we can choose our own way. We can choose our attitude and our response to life. We can choose to hold on to the inner freedom, which is our God-given gift.

Creators: The Composer

AUDREY: I want to tell you this story, because I felt it was fascinating, one of the most interesting stories to me in this entire book. As we move from being victims, let's talk about some stories of being creators in our own lives. The opposite of victim is creator. So we want to think and act like creators. How do we do that? What does that mean? David Emerald said, we cannot not create. So we are always creating. We are actually creators, even when we're thinking and talking and behaving like victims. We're creating the thing we don't want, because we are creators. And the last thing we'll talk about is vision. Vision anchors us to something we want. Because if we don't know what we want, and we're thinking like victims, we will create the wrong thing. Here's a really powerful example of that.

"I once had a dramatic demonstration of the close link between the loss of faith in the future and this dangerous giving up. F, my senior block warden, a fairly well-known composer and librettist, confided in me one day. He said, 'I would like to tell you something, doctor. I have had a strange dream. A voice told me that I could wish for something, that I should only say what I wanted to know, and all my questions would be answered. What do you think I asked? That I should like to know when the war would be over for me. You know what I mean, doctor. For me. I wanted to know when we, when our camp, would be liberated and our sufferings come to an end.'"

"'And when did you have this dream?' I asked. 'In February 1945,' he answered. It was then the beginning of March. 'What did your dream voice answer?' Furtively he whispered to me, 'March 30th.'"

AUDREY: For those of you who know the timeline of World War II, that will be very insightful.

"When F told me about his dream, he was still full of hope and convinced that the voice of his dream would be right. But as the promised day drew nearer, the war news which reached our camp made it appear very unlikely that we would be free on the promised date. On March 29th, F suddenly became ill and ran a high temperature. On March 30th, the day his prophecy had told him that the war and suffering would be over for him, he became delirious and lost consciousness. On March 31st, he was dead. To all outward appearances, he had died of typhus."

AUDREY: He was a creator who could not not create. And he created his own death by believing so furtively in what this dream voice had told him. It's so amazing to me, the power of our minds to create. So we are creators, and we are responsible for our inner state. He says:

"In spite of all the enforced physical and mental primitiveness of the life in a concentration camp, it was possible for spiritual life to deepen. Sensitive people who were used to a rich intellectual life may have suffered much pain, but the damage to their inner selves was less. They were able to retreat from their terrible surroundings to a life of inner riches and spiritual freedom. Only in this way can one explain the apparent paradox that some prisoners of a less hardy makeup often seemed to survive camp life better than those of a robust nature."

Vision

AUDREY: This leads us from the creator piece, where we know we are responsible for our responses to life, that we can choose the inner state regardless of external circumstances, that we are responsible for who we are inside, how we feel, and the spiritual and intellectual life we develop, which is protective in nature. This is so profound: that a rich spiritual and intellectual life was physically protective as well. And then he moves into vision. That's the third piece that's so vital to getting out of victimhood, to getting over the problem stories we tell ourselves, and to learning how to truly solve the significant problems of our lives with these key principles. He shares this experience:

"Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife's image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise. A thought transfixed me. For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire."

AUDREY: He goes on to talk about the intensification of the inner life by holding on to a vision. He sculpted his mind, he trained his mind to think about what he wanted to think, not in a reactionary way to his external circumstances. He says:

"My mind still clung to the image of my wife. I did not know whether she was alive or dead, but there was no need for me to know. Nothing could touch the strength of my love, my thoughts, and the image of my beloved. Had I known that my wife was dead, I think that I would still have given myself, undisturbed by that knowledge, to the contemplation of her image, and that my mental conversation with her would have been just as vivid and just as satisfying."

AUDREY: So he imagines his wife. He spends time with her. He talks with her in his mind. They have these beautiful conversations, and it's an emotional, spiritual, mental, and intellectual lifeline for him. It keeps him alive, very literally, and it keeps him from falling into victimhood, from being degraded by camp circumstances the way so many prisoners were. In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn talks about this same transformation: that some prisoners, if they chose the higher road, if they used their minds to concentrate and focus on new purpose and a new vision for their life, it not only saved them in the moment, it literally kept them alive and helped them move on in their lives.

AUDREY: He says he would keep talking to his wife. And one day he was in the cold, and his thoughts had become degraded again. He was thinking about how hungry he was, imagining the meal he was going to eat. And then he says:

"I became disgusted with the state of affairs which compelled me daily and hourly to think of only such trivial things. I forced my thoughts to turn to another subject. Suddenly I saw myself standing on the platform of a well-lit, warm, and pleasant lecture room. In front of me sat an attentive audience on comfortable, upholstered seats. I was giving a lecture on the psychology of the concentration camp. All that oppressed me at that moment became objective, seen and described from the remote viewpoint of science. By this method I succeeded somehow in rising above the situation, above the sufferings of the moment, and I observed them as if they were already of the past. Both I and my troubles became the object of an interesting psychological study undertaken by myself."

AUDREY: That vision, communing with his wife and loving her every day, and then envisioning a future goal for himself. He had been writing a book that was confiscated when he was put in the camp. Arriving home and writing that book, lecturing about it, teaching people the things about life purpose he had discovered and the importance of meaning in life, became the meaning of his life and the purpose of staying alive in the camp.

Closing Thoughts and Invitation

AUDREY: So these concepts, these fundamental principles of building up our reserves, of being true creators in our own lives, of seeing where we're falling victim, of identifying those victim types we've talked about and recognizing where we're doing that, of seeing that we're in drama and deciding to be creators instead, and of latching on to a vision bigger than ourselves, letting that meaning and purpose drive us into the future and out of drama into a creator mindset. That is really the key. And Viktor Frankl's book and his experiences in the concentration camp perfectly encapsulate that.

AUDREY: I am so grateful you've joined me today to talk about these things. If you're interested in these topics and want to learn more, keep listening to the podcast, and consider joining us this fall. As soon as you sign up, you'll be given access to the MDM Academy pod that's working on all of these concepts leading up to the event. We've got trainings coming up that you can be part of, where you can engage with Lindsey. And then we'll meet you that great day at the end of September and spend the day together. The links are in the description, and we would love to have you join us.

AUDREY: In the meantime, I hope this information has been helpful and inspiring to you. I hope you will see, in greater and greater clarity, how principles can rescue you from the difficult problems you are in. They can liberate you and make you free, and help you get back on the path to where you truly want to go. Thank you so much for joining me today, and I will see you next time.