“We had to learn ourselves, and furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.” — Viktor E. Frankl
Liberation, when it came, did not feel like freedom. That is Frankl’s first and most unsettling observation about the third psychological phase — the phase that began when the camp gates opened and the guards disappeared.
The prisoners walked out. Some did not move for a long time. Others stumbled through the gate and stopped on the road outside, unable to understand what to do next. A few began walking without direction and kept walking. The capacity to choose where to go — a basic freedom restored — was paralyzing rather than liberating. The body had learned, over years, to respond only to commands. The self that would generate its own direction had atrophied.
Frankl describes a scene shortly after liberation. A group of prisoners, now free, walked across a field and noticed a field of flowers. One of them pointed to the blossoms. No one spoke for a long moment. Then someone began to weep — not sobbing, but a quiet, private weeping that had nothing to do with joy.
The emotion that arrived first was not happiness. It was something much stranger: a blankness, an inability to feel what one had expected to feel. Years of training oneself not to feel had done its work too well. The switch did not flip automatically when the external conditions changed. The apathy that had been an adaptive defense now sat like a stone between the liberated prisoner and the joy that should have been theirs.
The technical term Frankl uses for this phase is depersonalization — a sense of unreality, of observing one’s own experience from the outside, of finding that one no longer fully inhabits one’s own life. He compares it to the experience of a deep-sea diver who ascends too quickly: one cannot go from the pressure of the depths to normal atmospheric pressure in an instant without causing damage.
The decompression from the psychological pressure of the camps had to be gradual. But nothing prepared for it, and nothing was provided for it. The world outside the camps expected the liberated to be grateful, to return to life, to pick up where they had left off. The liberated could not explain that there was no “where they had left off.” The person who had entered the camp no longer existed. The person who emerged was not the same.
Some prisoners made their way home to find their apartments occupied by strangers, their possessions distributed or destroyed, their families dead. The outside world had continued while they had been gone. It had not held still in mourning. People had moved into the vacated spaces and filled them with new lives.
This discovery could produce a bitterness that was, in some ways, harder to bear than anything experienced in the camp. In the camp, the suffering had been shared. Everyone around you was suffering too. The community of suffering was terrible but also binding — a form of solidarity in extremity. Returning home and finding the indifference of a world that had not suffered the same thing, that could not fully understand and was sometimes impatient to stop trying, was a particular kind of loneliness.
Frankl identifies several capacities that the camp had suppressed and that did not automatically revive.
The capacity for pleasure. Some prisoners found that they could not enjoy food, comfort, or rest even when these were freely available. The body seemed to distrust abundance. Simple pleasures that should have been delicious — a warm meal, a soft bed, walking without a guard — produced an anxious hypervigilance rather than relaxation. The nervous system took months, sometimes years, to stop expecting punishment.
The capacity for emotional range. The emotional bandwidth that the camp had narrowed — suppressing everything but the most urgent survival responses — did not quickly widen again. Some survivors described feeling unable to cry at deaths, unable to laugh at jokes, unable to be fully present in conversations. The dimmer switch that had been turned down could not be simply turned up again.
The capacity for trust. Years in an environment where other prisoners could become informers, where guards were arbitrary and violent, where any kindness might be a trap — these years left marks on the social instincts that simple liberty could not erase.
Frankl is honest about something that many survivors found difficult to discuss: the moral ambiguity of having survived. Some prisoners had survived in part because of circumstances that others had not controlled and did not deserve — a slightly better work assignment, a random act of favoritism from a guard, being in the right place when supplies were distributed. The awareness that one had lived while others, equally deserving or more deserving, had died was a source of what would later be called survivor’s guilt — a burden of unexplained obligation that some carried for the rest of their lives.
He does not resolve this easily. He simply names it. To survive is not automatically to have done something right. Sometimes it is simply to have been lucky. The task after liberation was to decide what to do with the fact of survival — what the life one had been given back was now for.
Frankl ends Part I with the question that points toward Part II. Having observed all of this — the psychological collapse, the unexpected resilience, the love that sustained, the beauty that pierced, the dignity that some maintained and others lost — he comes to the central question of his professional life:
What makes it possible for a human being to endure the unendurable?
The answer he found was not willpower, not optimism, not physical strength, not intelligence. The answer was meaning. Those who survived psychologically — not just physically, but as recognizable, whole human beings — tended to be those who had found or maintained a sense that their suffering was for something, that there was a why that made the how bearable.
This is the question that logotherapy was built to address: not “how do we avoid suffering?” but “how do we live with it in a way that does not destroy us?”