This is the transcript for my most recent podcast special episode, which I have decided to publish here in written format. You can find the video and audio for Tony Talks Back: Philosophy and Literature on YouTube and on Spotify Podcasts, and the audio on most major podcasting platforms.

YouTube: https://youtu.be/8rGOAwhK7VI

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1ZrDNWsokrWbfKpQ97UFU6

Hello internet. It has again been some time. I come back to you imbued with a new sense of purpose in life. Soon I will have a new season of this podcast out, this time on moral philosophy. But first I wanted to make this special on the most important book of our time: this one right here. Man’s Search for Meaning by Dr. Viktor Frankl, psychiatrist and psychotherapist, who survived the system of Nazi concentration camps spread across Europe; including within the overarching systems of infamous Auschwitz and Dachau. More than any other, this is the book we must be teaching to every single child in public education. I don’t care what Christian conservatives think; it’s not the Bible, it’s this book. My reasons as to why this book ought to be taught to every child constitute much of the remainder of this special.

Really, I should have made this episode almost exactly two years ago. I have known the vital importance of this topic to our present moment for nearly two years. I had been in the rather unique position of just having studied all this history while ostensibly studying law; a degree which was orders of magnitude easier to achieve than everyone assumes it to be. So I had a lot of free time, and I used it to play video games and study history; particularly World War II and ancient history. And then, October 7th, 2023. A date which will live in humanity’s collective shame for all coming time. This event, this massacre changed my life. It broke me; mentally, emotionally, even physically. I had unknowingly created the ‘perfect storm’ for myself to traumatize myself for life. And I was lost for a long time. But, as the old adage goes, sometimes you have to get lost in order to find your path. As Dr. Frankl himself writes, “Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.” So I am back, and on a mission to educate the world.

Firstly, to just give a very brief overview of Man’s Search for Meaning: the first thing you are likely to realize about this book is that it is very short. You could finish it in an hour or two if you really tried. Dr. Frankl wrote it over the course of nine days in 1945; and originally, he had meant to publish it anonymously. But let me tell you: every word in its slim stature contains profound wisdom. It is actually a little difficult to write this episode on the work and resist the urge to simply quote it whole. It punches far above its weight class. I first read it in undergrad. I still re-read it every couple years. It is sage and it is horrific. You cannot look away once you pick it up until you have finished it in its entirety.

The first part of the book is collected under the title ‘Experiences in a Concentration Camp’. Dr. Frankl notes that the work does not cover the ‘great horrors’, but rather the uncountable smaller torments and tortures prisoners in Nazi camps endured; and particularly those whom the Nazis deemed Jewish. Their system of determining racial hierarchy was as incomprehensible and illogical as any other part of their damnable ideology. For many former citizens of the Weimar Republic that found themselves in concentration camps after it became the Third Reich, they had lived their entire lives as simply Germans. Completely secular, with perhaps a Jewish grandparent.

But this one ‘drop of bad blood’ as it were became the defining feature of their entire lives in Nazi Germany and its occupied territories. In short, this is the end result of a very long, systematic propaganda effort by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s lead propagandist, and many other ignoble and forgotten names of despicability. ‘Der Ewige Jude’—‘The Eternal Jew’—was just one such propaganda film designed to dehumanize the Jewish people. For decades the NSDAP—the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei—the National Socialist German Workers’ Party—the Nazis—had worked to make Jews vilified as ‘unclean’, like vermin. Carriers of disease and moral decay. Europe, like most other places on Earth, has a traumatic past with the plague. What do you do with plague victims and lepers? Why, you dispose of them in order to save the rest. This is the “logic” that led to the murder of six million Jews and hundreds of thousands of Roma peoples. Never forget.

I am not going to go into a further detailed account here of the system of Nazi dehumanization and otherization that led men to become monsters towards their fellow humanity; I simply do not have enough time. In a way, that is where the story ends. The brutishness and brutality of the German occupiers of Holland—particularly towards Holland’s Jews—that led Anne Frank to conclude no civilized person ought to speak their tongue: that is the end result of decades, and centuries, and millennia, of the systematic targeting for hatred and lies and violence that Jews have endured. Not just endured—they’ve beaten the odds. They’ve come back stronger time and again. The worst crimes against humanity in history the scattered remnants of European Jewry lived through and then came to live in their own Jewish nation, with their own Jewish army, for the first time in two thousand years. Talk about a comeback story. If Hollywood made the movie you simply wouldn’t believe it. But of course Hollywood has their heads so far up their own asses they wouldn’t know a Roman from an Ottoman occupier of Jewish land.

Dr. Frankl explicitly states that most of the events in the book “...did not take place in the large and famous camps, but in the small ones where most of the real extermination takes place.” His exact pathway through the camps is a little tricky to pin down, but from what I can make of it, he was first sent from his home in Wien or Vienna, Austria, to Thereisenstadt concentration camp and ghetto in what was then occupied Czechoslovakia. From there he was briefly moved to Auschwitz in Poland, then sent to Dachau—the very first concentration camp and system outside Munich, or Muenchen—and he specifically ended up in the subgroup camps of Kaufering III and VI, and then finally Türkheim still within the Dachau system.

The Nazis stripped their camp prisoners of everything, literally everything. Dr. Frankl’s prized scientific magnum opus—trashed. Degrees—trashed. Everything was discarded from the human being except for their prisoner number. Yet more dehumanization; but perhaps necessary for the Nazis to maintain their own sanity while performing such unforgivable sins. On being forced to discard his life’s work, Dr. Frankl realized that he would have to strike out his entire former life in order to simply psychologically survive.

Dr. Frankl talks about the Capos, or prisoners that were given certain guard duties. I will not examine this section in detail, but it is interesting to note that Dr. Frankl believes Capos may be examined in the same psychological light as the Nazi and SS guards themselves. They were brutal to their fellow prisoners, some moreso than the actual Nazis. Perhaps it may be said that they were in a sense Nazis; after all, there was for a time a ‘Verband Nationaldeutscher Juden’ collective—the Association of German National Jews—that supported Hitler until he had them all persecuted and the group disbanded.

The unimaginable psychological trials endured by the prisoners, and specifically the manner in which any managed to survive at all in the concentration camps, forms the basis of the second part of Man’s Search for Meaning and Dr. Frankl’s broader psychotherapeutic theory of logotherapy. It is not the part I have focused most on in this special, but it is among the most motivating of philosophical examinations currently extant. In truth, the two parts are deeply intertwined. In the first part, Dr. Frankl remarked on Dostoevsky’s definition of man as a being that can get used to anything: “Yes, a man can get used to anything, but do not ask us how.”

I have read accounts of the ship Endurance and Ernest Shackleton’s failed Antarctic expedition that began in 1914. What those sailors went through at the hands of Mother Nature and survived to a man was incredible. Dr. Frankl’s experiences are like that, but multiplied by all the willful and wanton cruelty human imagination is capable of. Very quickly the prisoners had to lose all sense of normal human emotion, or they would surely have gone mad and been next in line for the gas chamber. To survive at all was life-or-death every single moment. “A provisional existence of unknown limit”, he writes.

Survival itself became the only morality known to the occupants of the camps—survival for oneself and one’s kin. There is a line from early in the book, “We who have come back, by the aid of many lucky chances or miracles—whatever one may choose to call them—we know: the best of us did not return.” And again later, “But it is not for me to pass judgment on those prisoners who put their own people above everyone else. Who can throw a stone at a man who favors his friends under circumstances when, sooner or later, it is a question of life or death? No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.”

Of the many horrors Dr. Frankl describes, the most chilling to me personally is that of the unending starvation every prisoner endured right up until the minute they died from it. Tiny scraps of bread and watery soup all the sustenance in an entire day. Dr. Frankl had gotten on the good side of one of the Capos to the point that he would make sure his soup had at least a few peas in it—“from the bottom” of the pot. The body devours itself until no muscle or fat can be found on the entire body. You have very likely seen the pictures. A thought occurred to me just now while taking a break from writing. I had eaten a hamburger, and a little bun was leftover that I tossed in the trash without a second thought. That scrap of bread may have been more than a day or two’s worth of rations in a Nazi concentration camp. It really does make you grateful just to be alive and well.

Dr. Frankl describes the whims of fate that dictated the lives and deaths of millions of prisoners. When his camp was nearing liberation, the SS came to “finish the job”. They persuaded many prisoners to load up in trucks to be taken for a prisoner of war exchange. Purely by chance, and against his will, Dr. Frankl was not chosen to be loaded on the trucks. These SS men and their trucks would then drive to a different camp, load the prisoners into buildings, and burn them all to death. Remember this: in the last days of the European Theatre of World War II, the Nazis deliberately chose to sacrifice war resources for the sake of murdering more Jews.

Dr. Frankl’s observations as a psychiatrist while still in the camps are invaluable. They form the basis of much of what we understand of the human psyche at the outermost edges of its limits. And it may be said that his active observations as a trained psychiatrist helped himself to survive—granted him some purpose, however imaginary. And of course it was not ultimately imaginary; he shares his observations with us in the present.

Dr. Frankl uses the quote from Nietzsche in his theories, “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.” And also, when in the camp and trying to encourage his fellow inmates, he again quoted Nietzsche, “Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich Staerker.” That which does not kill me, makes me stronger. And again he quotes auf Deutsch an unknown poet, “Was Du erlebst, kann keine Macht der Welt Dir rauben.” What you have experienced, no power on Earth can take from you.

He writes in a manner not unlike the ancient Stoics, “...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.” And again, “If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.”

For Dr. Frankl, it was mostly thoughts of being reunited with his wife that willed his spirit to carry on despite the hell on Earth he lived through. “The salvation of man is through love and in love”, he writes. He would not find out until after his liberation that she had died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp from typhus. He told his friend Otto of his undying love and to send it to his wife should he not survive a transfer he had been assigned to. Dr. Frankl survived this transfer. But he writes in an agony you can feel, “Otto, where are you now? Are you alive? What has happened to you since our last hour together? Did you find your wife again?” Absolutely heart-rending.

The book ends at least in its original form—my copy has a postscript written by Dr. Frankl in 1984—with these words: “Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.” The postscript adds this: “So, let us be alert—alert in a twofold sense: Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.” And how right he was.

How can one in 2025 possibly understand what Dr. Frankl and millions of other prisoners endured? All the horror unleashed by hatred. But we must yet keep the memory alive. Because in the blink of an eye it will be 2125. One hundred and eighty years after the Holocaust, will people still remember? I will do my damndest to make sure they do.

One of the most memorable lines in what is already an infinitely memorable book concerns Dr. Frankl’s stay at Auschwitz. He had arrived off the train and was going through the sorting line. Sorting line for what, you ask? I am certain that was the question on every prisoner’s mind. After making it through the sorting line, Dr. Frankl inquired to his fellow prisoners about the other destination, for a friend who had been sorted differently.

“Was he sent to the left side?” A prisoner responded to Dr. Frankl.

“Yes.”

“Then you can see him there.” The prisoner pointed to a distant chimney in view puffing out smoke. “That’s where your friend is, floating up to Heaven.”

This is the Holocaust in all its horror. It was a Holocaust by bullets, when roving death squads of Einsatzgruppen murdered millions of Jews across Nazi-occupied territories with cold-blooded executions and gas vans. Yes, they had gas vans. It was a Holocaust by starvation, in the various ghettos and concentration camps where no one but emaciated bodies and shells of humanity dwelt. It was a Holocaust by Zyklon B, the cyanide-pesticide used in the gas chambers of infinite horror. May God have mercy on humanity, for we have none to spare for ourselves.

I am now going to show you things; things you may not want to see. Nothing graphic; I’m not trying to get censored by the almighty Algorithm, though it may happen anyway. But these are images that have stayed with me after seeing them. They are appearing in my mind as I write, and likely as I now speak these words.

This—is the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany. The various mounds you see are the result of British bulldozers that had to bury the mass graves of the dead they found on liberation of the camp.

This one says ‘Hier Ruhen 2500 Tote, April 1945’—here lie 2500 dead, April 1945.

In one or several of these mass graves lie Anne Frank and her sister Margot. You can see their memorial headstone there. We will come back to Bergen-Belsen at the end.

This—is Babi Yar, or Babyn Yar.

It is, or was, a large ravine outside of Kyiv, Ukraine. The footsoldiers of Putin’s Russian Federation during his ongoing three-day “special military operation” landed rockets in the area, which now holds a large memorial park. It holds this memorial park because across the span of two days, the Nazi occupiers of Kyiv marched over 33,000 Jews to this ravine and executed them point-blank with bullets. Women—including pregnant women, children, the elderly; and of course men too. Everyone in Kyiv the Nazis decided qualified as Jewish enough to die there. This photograph shows the immediate aftermath, where Soviet prisoners of war were used as forced labor to cover the uncountable bodies. Thirty-three thousand-plus murdered humans lie in the dirt in that photo; murdered simply because they were Jewish. The Nazis would go on to murder tens of thousands more civilians and prisoners of war at the ravine. After the Soviets retook Kyiv, they would pave over the ravine and attempt to erase the memory of the Jewish victims that died there.

And this—this is the Supernova Music Festival memorial site near Kibbutz Re’im, Israel.

Of the approximately 4200 attendees at the festival, 410 would be murdered by Hamas terrorists on October 7th, 2023. 22 more would be abducted and held hostage in brutally inhumane conditions.

One American-Israeli by the name of Hersh Goldberg-Polin would be abducted in this way, starved near to death, and then executed in cold blood some eleven months later. This is Hersh. Never forget.

And this is Shani Louk.

She was just one of the attendees at that festival. A German-Israeli and peace lover. A new-age hippie, if you will. My kind of person. She was tortured and murdered and her body carried into Gaza in celebration. A video of her corpse was posted online, desecrated and spat on. I can picture it so clearly, as if I had just seen the video a moment ago. These are the scars that day left on me, and I am just a random person on the other side of the world.

And the Nova Music Festival Massacre itself only constitutes part of the crimes against humanity committed by Hamas on October 7th. In places like Kibbutz Be’eri and Kibbutz Nir Oz entire families were massacred. Women and children shot dead in their beds. Jews tortured both psychologically and physically before being murdered or kidnapped into a different kind of hell in Gaza. Arab Israelis like the al-Ziyadne family suffered the same. And foreign workers too—Thai and Nepalese nationals. Didn’t matter to Hamas. They were all “Zionists” and all therefore deserved death or worse. There is a documentary filmed by Sheryl Sandberg, ‘Screams Before Silence’, on the sexual violence against women committed by Hamas. It is utterly horrific, and it should be required viewing in high schools across America and the world.

As I write and now record this, it is still uncertain whether Hamas will finally release their forty-eight remaining hostages and end this war of genocidal aggression they began on October 7th, 2023. For theirs is the only side in this conflict driven by hatred. As Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel said in his 1986 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, “I trust Israel, for I have faith in the Jewish people. Let Israel be given a chance, let hatred and danger be removed from her horizons, and there will be peace in and around the Holy Land.”

I wear this shirt with the Star of David on it, now faded from time, and blocked by my camera and microphone placement, not because I am Jewish. I am not. It is in memorial to the victims of the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where eleven souls were unjustly taken from this world. The motto on the side is ‘Stronger than Hate’, a motto that has gotten me through many a day in recent memory. And I also wear this yellow pin as a reminder for those souls still held captive in the dungeons and terror tunnels of Hamas. More than anything in the entire world I wish for the final return of the hostages to their families. May it be so before a single person hears these words.

Finally, I want to show you this image.

This is not like the others in that it is not explicitly tragic, though the circumstances which created it certainly were. You can see from the caption that it shows Jews emigrating to Israel. These were DPs, or ‘Displaced Persons’. There were many such people in the immediate aftermath of World War II. But rapidly that number declined, until all those remaining in DP camps were Jewish. On creation of the Jewish nation, Israel, in the ancient homeland of the Jewish people, they finally had somewhere to go. They left the camp via the same railway they had arrived at Bergen-Belsen. It is possible one or a few of the people in this photo still live today in Israel.

I have written on this subject for nearly two years now. I have tried to educate people who do not want to be educated. I can forgive ignorance; I cannot forgive willful ignorance. Let me put this plain: the Holocaust did not create the modern nation of Israel. Sixty years of pogroms across Europe before the gas chambers came into being: this was the catalyst for Theodor Herzl and the original Zionist movement to establish a national home for the Jewish people. If Israel as a nation had existed when it was promised to be so by the British occupiers of Mandate Palestine vis-a-vis the Balfour Declaration, then the Holocaust could not have happened. European Jews would have had a safety valve to escape to.

In Dr. Frankl’s preface to Man’s Search for Meaning he mentions that he had actually managed to acquire an American visa to leave Austria before being sent to the camps; but his parents had not. Immigration quotas among the various countries of the world prevented the vast majority of Jews from going anywhere else. After the Holocaust, the Zionist movement in British Mandate Palestine was reinforced by two major groups of Jews: first, some hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors who had literally nowhere else to go. As you have seen, they were living in DP camps often right next to the concentration camps they had been liberated from years before. When Israel declared independence, they finally, finally had somewhere to go. They finally had a home.

The second group of Jews who came to Israel were those who were violently forced out of their homes across the Middle East and North Africa; across the Arab world. Pogroms and violence in the name of “anti-Zionism” ironically reinforced the Zionist nation. These Jews are known as Mizrahi, or ‘Eastern’, Jews, and they make up approximately half of the current Jewish population of Israel. They did not have to endure a Holocast: because they had somewhere to go. So long as hatred of the Jewish people still exists, Israel is an absolute necessity to exist in the world.

People wonder why everyone makes such a big deal about Israel, both for and against. My own friends certainly have wondered so many times. Why is this the sticking point of my philosophy? It’s just a tiny scrap of land with a relatively small population compared to the rest of the world; the only nation that happens to have the Star of David on its flag. If not for everyone making this fuss, no one would care about it at all. I am sorry, my Israeli friends, but it’s true. You would more or less be Tajikistan if everyone stopped trying to kill you all the time.

That final sentence though is exactly why I must care. Human morality cannot exist in part. It either is, or is not. If we allow our Jewish brethren to suffer by our hands just as they have so many times in the past, bearing that unbearable pain solely on their own, then humanity is simply not ready to progress. We should be better than this.

To quote Dr. Frankl one last time, “From all this we may learn that there are two races of men in this world, but only these two—the “race” of the decent man and the “race” of the indecent man. Both are found everywhere; they penetrate into all groups of society…The rift dividing good from evil, which goes through all human beings, reaches into the lowest depths and becomes apparent even on the bottom of the abyss which is laid open by the concentration camp.”

I am a futurist. I believe in the power of human progress. I must therefore believe that we can become better than this, and that we may one day and forever more make and keep the promise of ‘Never Again’.

If you found these topics and my presentation interesting or informative, you may also find my book 'Zionist Musings: Thoughts For A Better World' similarly engaging. You can purchase a paperback copy for $10 USD +shipping on Amazon and only $3 USD on Amazon Kindle:

https://a.co/d/bsVP2Hp

Man’s Search for Meaning by Dr. Viktor Frankl—this is a must-own book. If you do not yet have a copy, purchase one here:

https://www.amazon.com/Mans-Search-Meaning-Viktor-Frankl/dp/0807014273/

Remember Bergen-Belsen:

https://bergen-belsen.stiftung-ng.de/en/your-visit/historicalgroundsofthecamp/

Remember Babi Yar/Babyn Yar:

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/kiev-and-babi-yar

Remember the victims of October 7th:

https://october7memorial.com/memoriam

Remember the Nova Music Festival Massacre:

https://theweitzman.org/exhibitions/nova/

Watch Screams Before Silence, a documentary on the sexual violence of Hamas: