In 1944, a 39-year-old Austrian psychiatrist named Viktor Frankl was taken off a transport train at Auschwitz with his wife, his mother, his father and his brother. His family was sent to the gas chambers. He was sent to hard labour.
He survived that camp and three others, Kaufering, Turkheim and Dachau. He survived typhus, pneumonia and the long death marches at the end of the war. When he was finally liberated, he learned that everyone in his immediate family except his sister had been killed.
In the camps, Frankl had watched other prisoners carefully. He had trained his eye as a psychiatrist for more than a decade before the war, and even starving in a striped uniform, he kept watching. He noticed that two men could be given the same crust of bread, the same beating, the same impossible morning, and respond to it in two completely different ways. Some men gave up and died within days. Others walked through the same hell and kept something of themselves alive. He wanted to understand what that something was.
He found his answer in the space between what happened to a man and what the man did next. After the war, Frankl returned to Vienna, sat down, and wrote his book in nine days. He called it Man's Search for Meaning. In one passage, he wrote the sentence that would carry his life's work for the next eighty years.
"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."
Frankl lived to the age of ninety-two. He went on to found an entire school of psychotherapy, logotherapy, built on the idea that a human being's deepest drive is meaning itself. He treated patients, lectured at universities around the world, and watched his book sell more than sixteen million copies in fifty languages. Every lecture he gave and every patient he treated was shaped by what he had seen inside the wire.
Most of us, when something difficult happens to us, believe the difficulty is the whole story. Frankl spent his life proving that the difficulty is only half the story. The other half is what we choose to do with the space immediately after it.
"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing." The last freedom is the one we forget we have.