Well, my first book review:)Of all the books that I have read, I have chosen this one to be the book on which I will write a review because this is very special. By the time I had finished it,I felt I was very different person than the one who had picked it up.
Yeah, there are numerous facts, precise details, stories we know about the atrocities caused by the World War 2.But hearing it from a man, who is a psychologist himself and who had been there, went through all the horrible things we have heard of, is not very usual.
Actually, Man's Search For Meaning is a psychologist's memoirs of the atrocities meted out on the Jews, in the concentration camps during the World War 2. It was one of the books the sir at my CAT classes had asked us to read in order to improve our understanding in a wide variety of subjects, improve your vocabulary and anything and everything that results in the betterment of your English. I had bought it a long back and it took me a year and a half to actually sit down and start reading.(Oh no I am not one lazy thing, the book had such a boring cover page I dozed off the instant I saw it :))
Getting back to the book it had lots of sad facts(of the kind which makes people twitch their faces and say "how horrible!!!!!!!!!!!!!"). It begins with horrifying facts of dilapidated people being gassed, as no work could anymore be squeezed out of them, inmates being tortured by the capos(This actually reminds me of a situation from Amitav Gosh's "The Glass Palace",where one of the characters thinks "How do you fight an enemy who fights from neither anger nor enmity, but in submission to orders from superiors, without protest and without conscience?". I wonder if this thought ever crossed the minds of the inmates as they survived the torture of the capos.)
There are a lot of circumstances, which are even difficult to conceive as thoughts, that they had to go through. They lost their names, they were mere numbers that were stitched to their shirts. And it might be such an insecure feeling when a capo annoyed with something stared down at their number making a mental note of it.Well the more I think of putting myself in their shoes ,the harder it gets because I cannot imagine how would it be to lose it all, all you have had, all you have planned, all the dreams that you nourished with your actions, all that pride, your profession and most importantly your family . They are all gone in a second, like they never existed. Well I suppose that was how it was. They were stripped to the core. Nothing was left, except for you and the damn thing that still was called life(of course minus all things that made it a life ).As the author quotes in one of the occasions"With the end of an uncertainty there came the uncertainty of the end, " life of the inmates seemed to be mired in uncertainties.They were like, a gazillion questions that popped up in their minds, and died premature deaths in the void of their lives.
But with the beast comes the beauty:) In all these unfair, unjust circumstances, there were people who like phoenixes rose from the ugliness surrounding them, and lived their life their way. They proved that the man's liberty to choose his behavior, in any set of circumstances, cannot be taken away. His innermost freedom cannot be taken away.These were the people who shared their meagre rations of bread with others in the same place, where cannibalism had broken out. They set the standards of humans higher, much above the reach of the dividing factors that seemed to reign the thoughts of few minds.(and unfortunately of the ones in power). Well, there are instances where, people remember their loved ones and think that there is still something to hold onto, is beautiful. The author himself acknowledges the fact that, under those grave circumstances he realised that, "Love is the ultimate goal man can aspire to". Well, there are moments where insignificant events turned out to be funny, there were friendships that flourished, there were sympathetic capos, they was hope that life would go back to normal (the good old days)and there were efforts, very sincere efforts, to hold on to dear life.They yearned for the little things in life.They just wanted to go back, run their daily errands.
What is really heartbreaking is, the period following the liberation. The liberated inmates had to come to terms with a lot of things. The reasons they had to cling to life did not exist like, there was no family that awaited them. All the hopes were shattered like sand castle leaving no traces behind, not even a grain of sand. But in the mean time this concentration camp was the place, where the idea of finding meaning in life was conceived by Mr.Frankl. Initially, it started by telling the inmates that there was a lot in life to hold on to, like a loved one, a dream to be fulfilled and things like that, which can make our life a little more meaningful. This practice is now called logotherapy("logos" means meaning thus logotherapy is meaning therapy). It is practiced widely, and considered to be one of the greatest works in psychology after Sigmund Freud. When the basic principle remains the same, where in which a person is made aware of all those things in his life, that adds meaning to it. And once an individual discovers the meaning, he never lets it go.
Well this book was like a case study, where as you proceed, you get to know the basic mindset of humans, or to put it in layman's terms, it tells you what stuff you are made of. At the end of it, I felt like all the while I have been staring at a circle divided into two halves, a brighter and a darker(revealing the best and the worst of human natures) and only with a combination of these, the circle becomes a whole. So it is up to us, to shoulder the responsibility of being human, and more importantly, decide which is the legacy we want to carry forward, the brighter or the darker??
And about the book go buy it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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