Meaning by Rubin Battino

Author:Rubin Battino [Battino, Rubin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781845905408
Publisher: Crown House Publishing
Published: 2011-10-15T04:00:00+00:00

Colleague; Frankl; Man; Woman

Visual: Woman in camp clothes, view of tree branch through a window.

Stage Directions: Sounds of wind in trees, running water, birdsong.

COLLEAGUE: You’re a psychiatrist. You must have been studying yourself and the prisoners and your keepers all of the time. What did you learn?

FRANKL: Apathy was endemic—epidemic might be a better word. The majority of the prisoners suffered from a kind of inferiority complex. On the outside we fancied ourselves as “somebody”; here we were treated like complete nonentities.

COLLEAGUE: What about the special prisoners, the ones you called “prominent”? You know, the Capos, the cooks, the storekeepers, and the camp policemen.

FRANKL: They didn’t feel degraded at all—on the contrary, promoted! What do you think of that Capo?

MAN: Imagine! I knew that man when he was only a bank president. Isn’t it fortunate that he has risen so far in the world?

COLLEAGUE: Is everything relative?

FRANKL: Yes and no. Survival is an absolute. We always have choice of action, if not external, then internal. Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind.

COLLEAGUE: Even in those camps?

FRANKL: Yes. We who lived there can remember men who comforted others, gave away their last piece of bread.

COLLEAGUE: Not many!

FRANKL: Enough. Enough. They may have been very 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.

COLLEAGUE: As you did.

FRANKL: To survive as a human being. Every day had opportunities to make a decision which determined whether or not you would submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom. Any man can decide what shall become of him—mentally and spiritually.

COLLEAGUE: Wasn’t it Dostoyevsky who said, “There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings”?

FRANKL: Yes. Those words came to me often, especially about those martyrs in the camp whose suffering and death bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom cannot be lost—the way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement.

COLLEAGUE: Is such suffering necessary?

FRANKL: If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.

COLLEAGUE: Again I ask, is suffering necessary?

FRANKL: No. It is not necessary. Yet, there are often circumstances beyond our control—the camps, accidents, diseases—that happen. The way in which a man accepts his fate—those things beyond his control—can add a deeper meaning to his life. He controls how he responds.

COLLEAGUE: Few can do that.

FRANKL: Of the prisoners, it is true that only a few kept their full inner liberty and attained these values, but even one such example is sufficient proof that man’s inner strength may raise him above his outward fate. And such men are not only in concentration camps—those opportunities are everywhere.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.