环球英语 — 445：Viktor Frankl
Voice 1
Welcome to Spotlight. I’m Liz Waid. Spotlight uses a special English method of broadcasting. It is easier for people to understand, no matter where in the world they live.
Voice 2
“Fifteen hundred persons had been travelling by train for several days and nights. There were eighty people in each train car. The cars were so full that only the top of the windows let in the gray morning light. We did not know if we were already in Poland or not.
Then the train slowed as it came near a main station. Suddenly someone cried out, “There is a sign, Auschwitz!” Everyone’s heart missed a beat. Auschwitz–the very name stood for all that was horrible: gas chambers, ovens, the deaths of many people. Slowly, the train moved forward as if it wanted to protect its passengers as long as possible: Auschwitz!”
Voice 1
Today’s Spotlight is on Viktor Frankl. This program uses Frankl’s own words to describe his experiences in the Auschwitz prison camp during World War Two. People in this camp, and many other camps, suffered greatly. Thousands died. Auschwitz was a place without enough food, clothing, medicine, or shelter. It was designed to crush all hope and meaning. But Frankl found that hope and meaning are not so easily crushed.
Voice 2
“Eventually we moved into the station. That first silence was broken by shouted commands. We were to hear those rough voices from then on, over and over again.”
“Fifteen hundred prisoners were put in a rough wooden building. It was built for only two hundred. We were cold and hungry and there was not enough room for everyone to sit on the dirt ground. One five–ounce piece of bread was our only food in four days.”
“The great majority of people were divided off from us. This was a death sentence for them. It was carried out within the next few hours. ... We who were saved, found out the truth that night. I asked someone where my friend had been sent ... He pointed to the chimney, the stone smoke–stack, a few hundred metres off. It was sending a column of fire up into the gray sky. It broke up into an evil cloud of smoke... I still did not understand until the truth was explained to me in simple words – he had been killed and his body had been burned.”
“We slept in beds which were built one upon the other. On each bed nine men slept, directly on the wooden boards. Two blankets were shared by each group of nine men. We could lie only on our sides. We were crowded against each other. This did have some advantages because it was so very cold.”
“We were beaten for the smallest reason, sometimes for no reason at all. For example, bread was passed out at our work site and we had to line up to get it. Once, the man behind me stood off a little to one side and this displeased the guard. I did not know what was happening. But suddenly I received two sharp blows to my head. Only then did I see the guard at my side using his stick. At such a time it is not the physical pain which hurts most; it is the mental pain caused by the injustice, the unreasonableness of it all.”
“Almost everyone had a time where they thought about killing themselves. It was born of the hopelessness of the situation, the danger of death standing over us at every hour of every day.”
“The hardest time of the twenty–four hours of camp life was waking up from sleep. While it was still night, three blows of a whistle woke us from our sleep and from our dreams. We then struggled with our shoes. Our feet were painful and swollen.
One morning I heard someone, whom I knew to be brave and proud, cry like a child. He finally had to go into the snow in his bare feet. His shoes had become too small for him to wear.”
“The religious interest of the prisoners was the most honest you could imagine. The most amazing prayers and services were said in the corner of a building. Or in the darkness of the locked truck in which we were brought back from a far off worksite. Even though we were tired, hungry, and frozen in our ragged clothing.”
Voice 1
Frankl was a psychiatrist, a kind of doctor. He helped people with emotional and mental problems. He filled his time by studying other prisoners. Did they lose hope? Did they dream of people they loved? Did prisoners become self–centred? Frankl looked around him with his doctor’s eyes, and this is what he learned:
Voice 2
“The experience of camp life shows that man can choose what he does. There were examples, which proved that man can keep a part of his spiritual freedom. He can keep his independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of mental and physical stress.
We who lived in prison camps can remember the men who walked around helping other people, giving away their last piece of bread. They were few in number, but they offered enough evidence that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms– to choose one’s attitude in any given situation, to choose one’s own way.”
“One day, a few days after we were freed, I walked through the country past fields of flowers. Birds flew into the sky and I could hear their song. There was no one around. There was nothing but the wide earth and sky and the bird’s song and the freedom of space.
I stopped, looked around, and up to the sky–and then I went down on my knees. I had only one sentence in mind it was:
‘I called to the Lord from my narrow prison and He answered me in the freedom of space.’
How long I knelt there and repeated this sentence I cannot remember. But I know that on that day, in that hour, my new life started. Step by step I moved forward, until I again became a human being.”
Voice 1
Even before he was a prisoner, Frankl was a very important psychiatrist. He used his experiences to develop a new theory of psychiatry, called logotherapy. This theory is about how people find the meaning of their lives, even with terrible suffering. Frankl died in 1997 at the age of ninety–two. But his life is still guiding people today.
