The internationally renowned psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl experienced first hand the utter depravity of Auschwitz and Dachau. He knew the immense physical torment, psychological torture and spiritual desolation of those most inhuman of places. They were not called death camps for figurative effect.
Suicide was not unknown among those sent there to suffer grievously and die. Yet, strikingly, Frankl writes in his autobiographical study, Man’s Search for Meaning, of the obligation fellow inmates accepted to frustrate such occurrences: “A very strict camp ruling forbade any efforts to save a man who attempted suicide… Therefore, it was all-important to prevent these attempts from occurring.”
