Yes to Life

I remember hearing a lecture at St James’s Piccadilly by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross when she said that we are all put through the ringer of life, and we come out crushed or polished - or maybe sometimes both in sequence, first crushed then polished. This metaphor applies existentially to the accounts in these two wartime books – if you weren’t crushed, you could come out polished, or, in the case of Etty Hillesum, maintain your fundamental human dignity even in the face of mass deportation and systematic extermination. Yes to Life brings together three lectures given in Vienna in 1946 before Frankl wrote his bestselling Man’s Search for Meaning, which I first read over 40 years ago and which sold 9 million copies. The key to Frankl’s title is ‘in spite of everything’ as we have the ultimate choice to suffer meaningfully rather than experience suffering as meaningless. This is life asking us a question, rather than us questioning life, and this entails assuming responsibility for one’s attitude. Napoleon Hill once said that our attitude to life determines life’s attitude to us.

For readers unfamiliar with Frankl’s story, he was by profession a psychiatrist who was deported to Auschwitz and was one of the 5% not gassed but put to work in the most brutal conditions where inmates are stripped of their identity and reduced to a bare existence represented as mere numbers. To the guards, with the occasional exception, prisoners are subhuman, their life and death has no intrinsic value. In these circumstances, as also with Etty in the Jewish community in Amsterdam, to endure with courage and without bitterness represents inner success in a condition of being ‘spiritually bombed out’ and hence tempted to succumb to fatalism. Crucially, our humanity resides in individual human beings and the integrity of our inner life in the face of overwhelmingly challenging circumstances. What does life expect from us under such conditions?

Etty’s story is quite remarkable in this respect. Although she undergoes moments of despair and discouragement, she consistently maintains that life is good and beautiful, that succumbing to the poison of hatred is defeat and, like Frankl, that we are responsible for determining our inner responses to outer circumstances, however grim and inexorable. She had a shared sense of unavoidable common destiny, and comes to terms with this terrible prospect. She writes that in unguarded solitary moments, she is able ‘to live against the naked breast of life, and her arms round me are so gentle and so protective and my own heartbeat is difficult to describe: so slow and so regular and so soft, almost muffled, but so constant, as if it would never stop.’ (p. 166). She adds that this is also her attitude to life.

Later, she writes that she must try to live a good and faithful life to her last breath: ‘Everything we need is within us. And we have to take everything that comes: the good and the bad.’ (p. 189) She has looked at her destruction straight in the eye and accepted it into her life in a way that her love of life has not been diminished, even though she is marked for death - which she also looks in the eye ‘accepting destruction as part of life and no longer wasting my energies on fear of death or the refusal to acknowledge its inevitability.’ She adds that, although it sounds paradoxical, ‘by excluding death from our life we cannot live a full life, and by admitting death into our life we can enrich it.’ Nor does she blame God; we are accountable to God and to life: ‘You cannot help us, but we must help You and defend Your dwelling place inside us to the last.’ (p. 218) I found this an extraordinary statement, and one with which Frankl would surely resonate.

He would also agree (p. 280) that ‘a soul is forged out of fire and rock crystal’, that compliance is a form of inner defeat, and that ‘we should be willing to act as a balm for all wounds.’ Etty’s analysis of the modus operandi of the Jewish Council and the transit camp at Westerbork is both searing and compassionate. It is from this place that 93 trains - with over 1,000 people crammed into each - departed for Auschwitz on a weekly basis, so that negotiations simply postponed the inevitable, as the quota had to be filled. Many, including her parents, were gassed on arrival. Etty draws much comfort from her reading, including the work of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Hegel and Rilke. Her lifestyle is bohemian and liberated, involving complex relationships and varying articulations of love. Her last letter was thrown out of the train on the way to Auschwitz and was discovered by a farmer. Her extraordinary diaries and letters are her spiritual testimony, as is also the work of Viktor Frankl, but he survived to formulate his philosophy of meaning and logotherapy with its far-reaching implications and applications.

Etty has some sound advice about dealing with ‘irksome details that grind us down every day’ – people lose themselves in detail and drown, which is why they get driven off course and find existence pointless: ‘The few big things that matter in life are what we have to keep in mind; the rest can be quietly abandoned. And you can find those few big things anywhere, you have to keep rediscovering them in yourself so that you can be renewed. And in spite of everything you always end up with the same conviction: Life is good after all, it’s not God’s fault that things go awry sometimes, the cause lies in ourselves.’ (p. 341) Her attitude was apparently evident to another inmate, who told her ‘You’re the sort of person who makes something of her life in any circumstances.’ (p. 350) And she reports that one of her colleagues said when referring to the awful practices in the camp that ‘Each moment of your life that your courage fails is a lost moment.’ Such existential insights are still capable of inspiring readers 80 years on. Life continues to ask us similar questions, even if not in such intense circumstances, and our individual responsibility is to rise to the occasion – and we may well need to demonstrate moral courage in response to digital totalitarian measures in the years ahead to uphold our essential human dignity as fundamentally spiritual beings.