Dear Dana:

“I  helped a lot to the point of exhaustion, mental and physical“- thank you for helping people, for helping a lot!

“I would like to consult the participants of the forum, that live in harsh places. Places, where you have to face terrible sights and situations every day, things that tear you apart, and still continue functioning. Do you manage to do it? And if so, how?… How do you manage to survive the mental and physical stress of living in a harsh environment without exhausting yourself or losing your mind?“-

– one group of extremely harsh places were the Nazi Concentration Camps during World War 2. Viktor Frankl wrote a book titled Man’s Search for Meaning (1946), in which he shared about his experiences as a prisoner in the concentration camps. In his book, he concludes that life never ceases to have a meaning, and that the meaning of life is found in every moment of living, that there is always a freedom of choice, even in severe suffering.

He also concluded that there are only two races of people: decent and indecent, that no society is free of either of them, and thus there were decent Nazi  guards and indecent prisoners, most notably the Kapo who would torture and abuse their fellow prisoners for personal gain.

Quotes from the book: “Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life”.

“Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how'”.

“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”.

“Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become the next moment”.

““For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment”.

“In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning”.

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves”.

“It is not freedom from conditions, but it is freedom to take a stand toward the conditions”.

“For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best”.

anita