[In the following positive review of From Death-Camp to Existentialism, Savitz focuses on Frankl's concentration camp experiences and discusses the psychological factors that enabled some people to survive such horrors.]

This small book [From Death-Camp to Existentialism] brings to focus many shocking scenes of human tragedy and at the same time it reveals a number of keen psychological observations worthy of serious contemplation. In these pages we hear the authentic, restrained voice of a victim of a Nazi concentration camp—a man-made hell. The author is professor of neurology and psychiatry on the medical faculty of the University of Vienna. His voice and language are restrained—often too restrained, for he attempts the difficult task of giving an unbiased picture. Dr. Frankl himself is the victim. He is the subject and the object of many observations, and how can one psychologically obtain complete detachment under such circumstances? Furthermore, in describing horrors without the heat of emotion, the author deprives himself of sufficient light to see and evaluate them clearly. Nor does he attempt to narrate these bestial brutalities and the inhumanities of man to man, but rather he attempts to reveal the inner self, the subjective experience of a psychiatrist who survived them.

Frankl was a prisoner in Auschwitz for three years. He lived in a landscape surrounded by electrified barbed wires. Men were brought in daily in carload lots, like cattle. Not only were they deprived of their belongings but they were stripped of all of their human and personal traits. They lost all feelings, were de-humanized and depersonalized. No ethical or moral considerations occupied the prisoner's mind; his only aim and goal was to survive at all costs. Stripped of all human values, helpless and miserable, the prisoner was neither alive nor dead.

What were the vital mental forces that kept the prisoners alive and enabled them to survive in spite of all the miseries, and even prevented a number of them from committing suicide? The author gives some psychological clues to this human riddle. First, there was what is known as the "delusion of the reprieve." The condemned man, immediately before execution, gets the illusion that he may yet be reprieved at the very last moment. The fortunate were condemned to die immediately, in the gas chamber or crematorium. The survivors, who were a few hundred yards away, saw the chimneys send up a column of smoke to the sky; yet they clung to shreds of hope. Perhaps relief will soon come. This is a latent defense mechanism in the soul of many hopeless human being.

Another defense mechanism is "cold curiosity," a kind of objectivity in the midst of the most miserable circumstances. As an example, the author tells of standing in the open air in the chill of autumn, stark naked, still wet from a shower, trembling yet mentally occupied with curiosity, "What will happen?" This was probably a wish to die peacefully, but when the worst did not happen, a kind of relief was felt.

The prisoner's loss of fear of death, which is a kind of emotional death, is still another form of defense in the process of survival. The horrible environment of the camp gradually erased every trace of human emotion. The longing for home, physical weakness, the loathsome work that each one was assigned to do, blunted all human feelings. Suffering became a daily routine; they saw men dying every day, yet this sight did not make the slightest impression. This, too, was a kind of protective wall that helped some to survive.

Another factor was concern for inner spiritual values. Notwithstanding "cultural hibernation," the inmates ceaselessly discussed politics and religion. It is an interesting phenomenon that more sensitive, though often feeble-bodied, persons were better able to survive than were many of the more physically robust. (We have also observed this phenomenon in institutions for senior citizens. The more learned and cultured among them retain their mental faculties to the end, unlike the others.) Dr. Frankl gives a fine example of this—if a person was able to envisage a loved one far away, he could, as it were, escape from his immediate environment. Here one learns the power of love and its value in human survival.

Humor is also a mental device with survival value in critical situations threatening life itself. It is surprising that in the concentration camp, in a climate of human tragedy, inmates would think of some humorous episode that would lift them above their miserable environment. They would imagine some acquired uncouth mannerisms springing up in the future in the most respectable places. This would bring a smile or a laugh to the poor victims, and it acted, even though just for a moment, as an anaesthetic and helped them to forget their misery.

Looking forward to the future proved to be an aid to survival. In many cases it prevented suicide. In the words of Nietzsche, "he who has a 'why' to live for, can bear almost any 'how.'" By such reasoning prisoners found meaning or purpose for their suffering. Evil appeared necessary—as some Jewish sources have it—for without it there can be no good.

This, finally, brings the author to his basic concept of logotherapy. Whereas Freud introduced the pleasure principle as the motivating force in human activity, and Adler the "will to power," Frankl introduces a third principle. He states that man is dominated by the "will to meaning." That is, each person has a mission in life, which he must discover for himself, and this is the force that gives meaning to his existence and helps him in the struggle for survival. When this "will to meaning" remains unfulfilled, there develops in man "existential frustration." By "existential" the author describes man's quest for a meaning of his existence; by "frustration," the feeling of meaninglessness of life. According to Dr. Frankl, this "existential" vacuum is a source of neuroses, just as is sexual frustration in Freudian psychology, or what Adler terms the "inferiority feeling."

The book has much to offer from a literary, psychological, and philosophical point of view. I recommend it very highly to lay and professional readers alike, although one may differ with some of its conclusions concerning the followers of the Nazi regime. Thus the author seems to be too forgiving toward the camp guards. Granted that some of them were sadists in the purest clinical sense and that there is good and evil in every race and in every nation. However, I feel this is an oversimplification. The brutalities of the Nazi era clearly demonstrate that blind allegiance to a psychopathic personality despiritualizes his followers and turns them into criminal and beastly hordes. Modern civilization is as frail as a thin layer of ice over a river which cracks under the boots that step over it.