11/27/2025
✨ A Thought for Thanksgiving✨
I want to share something powerful with you today. It’s a story about Viktor Frankl and yes, it’s long, but it is so worth reading. His story carries a truth that has the power to change your life if you let it.
Frankl survived the unimaginable in the concentration camps, not because he could change his circumstances, but because he discovered something life-changing:
We cannot control what happens to us, but we can always control how we choose to respond.
That truth is the key to overcoming anxiety, depression, fear, disappointment, and so many struggles we all carry. Anxiety grows when we try to control outcomes we were never meant to control. Depression deepens when we believe our circumstances define our worth or our future.
But freedom begins the moment we realize this:
Our response is our power. Our response is our choice. Our response is where our peace is found.
No matter what storm you’re facing…
No matter what someone else chooses…
No matter what life throws your way…
You still hold the most powerful thing in your hands, your response.
When you shift your focus from controlling the situation to controlling your response, everything changes. This is where strength grows. This is where peace settles in. This is where happiness becomes possible again.
So as you read Frankl’s story, let it encourage you.
Let it remind you that even in the hardest moments, there is hope… because your response is something no one can ever take from you.
đź’› You are stronger than you think, and you have more choice than you realize.
You Can Change Your Response To Situations
They tattooed a number on his arm and burned his life's work in front of him—but what the N***s destroyed became the one idea that would teach millions how to survive their darkest moments.
Vienna, 1942. Dr. Viktor Frankl had a choice that would haunt him forever: escape to America with his visa, or stay with his elderly parents who had no way out.
He was 37. A brilliant psychiatrist. Years of research sewn carefully into his coat lining—a manuscript that would revolutionize how we understand the human mind.
He chose to stay.
Within months, the Gestapo came for all of them. The train doors opened to Auschwitz.
Guards ripped open his coat, searching for valuables. Found only papers covered in dense handwriting. They laughed. Threw his manuscript—years of work, his entire professional legacy—into the fire. Stripped him. Shaved him. Tattooed his arm: 119104. Viktor Frankl the psychiatrist no longer existed. Only a number remained.
But here's what those guards couldn't understand: you can burn a man's papers, but you cannot destroy what he knows. And what Viktor Frankl knew about the human mind would keep him alive—and eventually change the world.
In the camps, he began noticing something the SS doctors whispered about.
Men weren't just dying from starvation or typhus or beatings—though those killed thousands daily. They were dying from something invisible. Something that happened in the mind first, then the body. They were dying from hopelessness.
The moment a prisoner gave up—truly surrendered inside—his body would collapse within days. You could see it in their eyes first. The light going out. Then the body followed. But other prisoners, equally starved and brutalized, somehow endured.
What separated the survivors from the dying? Not strength. Not youth. Not luck.
The survivors had something to live FOR. A wife they needed to find. A child waiting somewhere. Unfinished work that mattered. A promise they'd made. A why that was stronger than the suffering. So Viktor Frankl began a quiet experiment—not in a laboratory, but in hell itself. He would approach men on the edge of collapse and whisper questions: "Who needs you to survive this?" "What work did you leave unfinished?" "What will you tell your grandchildren about this someday?"
He had no food to offer. No medicine. No way to ease their physical agony.
But he offered something the N***s couldn't confiscate: a reason to see tomorrow.
One man remembered his daughter's smile. Held that image. Survived to find her.
Another kept working on a scientific problem in his mind. Survived to solve it.
Viktor himself survived by mentally reconstructing his destroyed manuscript—paragraph by paragraph, in the darkness after 20-hour labor shifts.
The N***s burned his papers. But the ideas lived in his mind.
April 27, 1945. Liberation. Viktor Frankl walked out of Dachau weighing 85 pounds. Barely alive. Then he learned the truth: His wife Tilly—murdered in Bergen-Belsen. His mother—murdered in Auschwitz. His brother—murdered in Auschwitz. His father—dead in Theresienstadt. Everyone he'd stayed to protect was gone.
He had every reason to give up. Every reason to believe that survival was pointless, that meaning was a lie. Instead, he sat down and did something extraordinary. Nine days. In nine days, he poured out the entire manuscript from memory—the one the N***s destroyed three years earlier. But this version was different. This wasn't theory anymore. This was proof. He'd tested his ideas in the one place where everything else was stripped away. Where hope should have been impossible. And he'd proven they were true. He called it Logotherapy—therapy through meaning. The core idea was devastatingly simple: Humans can endure almost anything if they have a reason why.
He borrowed words from Nietzsche: "He who has a why to live can bear almost any how." But Viktor Frankl didn't just quote it. He lived it. In Auschwitz. In Dachau. In places where meaning should have died.
The book was initially called "...Nevertheless Say Yes to Life." Later, in English: "Man's Search for Meaning." Publishers rejected it. "Too dark," they said. "Who wants to read about concentration camps?" But slowly, the book found its readers. Therapists recognized profound truth in it. People in despair found hope in it. Cancer patients facing death. Veterans with PTSD. People in prison. People who'd lost everything. People sitting alone at 3 AM unable to find a reason to keep going. They read Viktor Frankl's words and discovered something revolutionary: Their suffering could have meaning. Not because suffering is good—but because even in suffering, we choose what it means. The impact was seismic.
Today, "Man's Search for Meaning" has sold over 16 million copies in 50+ languages. The Library of Congress named it one of the ten most influential books in America.
But numbers don't tell the real story. The real story is the countless people whose names we'll never know who picked up this book when they couldn't find a reason to continue—and found one.
Because Viktor Frankl proved something the N***s tried to disprove:
You can strip everything from a human being—freedom, family, food, future, health, hope—and one final freedom remains: The freedom to choose what it all means.
You cannot always control what happens to you. But you can always, always choose what you make of it. The N***s tried to reduce Viktor Frankl to a number. They failed. Because prisoner 119104 walked out of those camps with something more powerful than any manuscript: the lived knowledge that meaning is the one thing no one can ever take away.
Viktor Frankl died in 1997 at age 92. But right now, somewhere:
In a hospital room, someone facing a terrifying diagnosis is reading his words and choosing to fight. In a therapist's office, someone is discovering their depression doesn't have to be meaningless. In a quiet bedroom at 3 AM, someone barely holding on is reading this line: "When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves." And they're deciding to hold on one more day. That's not just a book. That's not just theory. That's a man who lost everything teaching the world that meaning survives when nothing else does.
The N***s gave him a number. History gave him immortality. The manuscript they burned became the book that saved millions. The identity they tried to erase became a light still guiding people through darkness. The man they tried to reduce to nothing proved that humans can never be reduced to nothing—as long as they can find a reason why. Prisoner 119104 didn't just survive Auschwitz. He transformed the worst of human evil into humanity's greatest wisdom about resilience. He turned suffering itself into a source of healing.
Find your why. Hold onto your why. Let your why carry you through the darkness.
Because if Viktor Frankl could find meaning in Auschwitz, you can find meaning in whatever you're facing right now. Not because your pain doesn't matter. But because YOU get to decide what your pain means. That's the freedom no one can ever take away. That's the gift prisoner 119104 gave the world.
