man-s-search-for-meaning

MAN'S SEARCH FOR MEANING
members of the little community in our hut died. Each
of us could calculate with fair accuracy whose turn
would be next, and when his own would come. After
many observations we knew the symptoms well,
which made the correctness of our prognoses quite
certain. "He won't last long," or, "This is the next
one," we whispered to each other, and when, during
our daily search for lice, we saw our own naked bodies
in the evening, we thought alike: This body here, my
body, is really a corpse already. What has become of
me? I am but a small portion of a great mass of human
flesh . . . of a mass behind barbed wire, crowded into a
few earthen huts; a mass of which daily a certain
portion begins to rot because it has become lifeless.
I mentioned above how unavoidable were the
thoughts about food and favorite dishes which forced
themselves into the consciousness of the prisoner,
whenever he had a moment to spare. Perhaps it can be
understood, then, that even the strongest of us was
longing for the time when he would have fairly good
food again, not for the sake of good food itself, but for
the sake of knowing that the sub-human existence,
which had made us unable to think of anything other
than food, would at last cease.
Those who have not gone through a similar experience
can hardly conceive of the soul-destroying mental
conflict and clashes of will power which a famished
man experiences. They can hardly grasp what it means
to stand digging in a trench, listening only for the siren
to announce 9:30 or 10:00 A.M. - the half-hour lunch
interval - when bread would be rationed out (as long
as it was still available); repeatedly asking the fore-
50