Famous Jews in History: Victor Frankl (1905–1997)
- Mar 11
- 1 min read
Viktor Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor who endured Auschwitz and several other Nazi concentration camps. His parents, his brother and his pregnant wife were murdered.
After the war he wrote Man’s Search for Meaning, one of the most widely read books of the twentieth century.
Frankl’s central idea was simple but profound: even in the worst circumstances, a person still has one freedom left, the freedom to choose how to respond.
He wrote: “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.”
Frankl did not deny suffering. He experienced it directly. But he believed resilience begins in the human spirit. That a person can make the decision to retain dignity even when the world becomes brutal.