I Went To The Largest Nazi Concentration Camp. Here’s How It Changed Me.
August 2016, Poland. I wasn’t aware my life was going to change.
My work brought me to Poland in the year 2016 for a conference.
I spent my time in Warsaw. I got the chance to visit Krakow towards the end.
With two friends, I walked through the most horrifying place I’ve been to yet — Auschwitz & Birkenau. For anybody who doesn’t know these places, here’s a quick context:
It was the largest of the Nazi concentration camps during World War II.
The Nazis killed more than 1.1 million men, women and children here.
We walked through the grounds that are now preserved as a memoir of those dark days.
It left me dumbfounded, disturbed, and speechless.
For that day, it took away my will to eat or talk to anyone.
It crushed me inside. I was standing on the ground where a million people were killed.
I saw the gas chambers, the execution walls, and the trains in which the prisoners were brought in. Something changed inside me.
A couple of years later, I read the book “Man’s Search for Meaning”, written by a psychiatrist — Victor E Frankl. He was a prisoner in these Nazi concentration camps.
His anecdotes changed my outlook on life. I carry these lessons with me years later. I’ve read this book many times. It teaches me something new every time.
Here are some lines for you to ponder upon:
He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how.
Frankl expresses that his why came from his love for his wife (imprisoned somewhere else). Without knowing whether she’s alive or executed, he talks about how he spent time thinking of their love.
It’s a lesson for life in most situations, even today for me. I’ve led diverse teams, managed large stakes, and taken risky decisions — all with this belief.
When in doubt, go back to the why. The why will guide you through.
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 shares stories about his observation of his fellow prisoners. Despite living in the most inhuman conditions, they could find bliss. At times in the warmth of the sun or sometimes little dance together. They laughed & sang together.
These lines will stick with me for life. I’m fascinated by the potential that we humans hold within.
What was it in those prisoners that made them notice a beautiful sunrise amidst all that pain?
Most of us live believing that circumstances shape our lives. But the truth is, our choices — regardless of circumstances — shape our lives.
Everything can be taken away (even the right to live, in these prisoners’ cases).
One thing that is still yours is the choice of your response — the choice of your way.
What circumstances come to mind as you read this?
What choices can change your response to them?
It can be seen that mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become.
Such a tension is inherent in the human being and therefore is indispensable to mental well-being.
We should not, then, be hesitant about challenging man with a potential meaning for him to fulfill. It is only thus that we evoke his will to meaning from its state of latency.
I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology “homeostasis”, i.e., a tensionless state.
What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.
This paragraph drove it home for me. There are extreme misconceptions about how one should deal with mental health.
Most mental health conversations pander to the weaknesses & insecurities of people. Selling us short-term solutions.
Research has shown that stress is an important aspect of human growth.
There’s no point putting effort into avoiding tension.
The better thing to do is to raise one’s threshold for tension.
(Watch this Huberman Lab podcast to understand how)
Learn the ability to control it, manage it, and deal with it.
That leads to growth.
There is no reason you should feel entitled to lead an “easy” life.
Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.
If there was a line that could describe the solution to most people’s problems, it would be this.
We all have heard that “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional”.
My journey has taught me that most suffering is self-imposed.
It is a choice we make.
The key is to move from Reaction to Response.
You can fail and suffer in reaction. Or you can analyze the failure and figure out a response.
Form a clear & precise picture of the failure. Tackle what you need to.
Pain can be a source of learning. Self-aware individuals understand this.
Humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds.
People closest to me don’t understand why I laugh in the middle of the toughest conversations.
This has become a deep part of my everyday life. Life is too short to be taken so seriously. Finding humour in calamity, even if for a couple of seconds, helps me rise above it.
If I saw an exam paper and knew nothing, I laughed.
When I set a goal to run 10k in 60 mins and couldn’t for the first few times, I laughed. Loudly. On the road.
Every time a challenge presents itself, I’ve trained my mind to smile at it.
It fascinates me that we have access to this emotion. I wonder if other animals have that.
Our minds understand humour. We feel humour. Even on the darkest of days, this itself is a phenomenon worth appreciating.
Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance.
Love is the ultimate and the highest goal a person can aspire to. The one common thing that we’re all born with is love.
Even if it is for a moment, a person who has lost it all could still know bliss in their love for another.
Everything above — pain, suffering, response, choices, circumstances — can be overcome by love.
The verb is not enough, though. One must be the noun.
To love is not enough. One must be love.
If I had to choose the one most important thing my visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau taught me, it is to be love.
Lessons from this book and my visit to the concentration camps will never fade away for me. Wherever you are in your life, this is a book worth reading.
It drilled into me a need to be compassionate — towards friends, family, or even strangers.
For anyone who wants to do any good in the world, start by going here.
It is as significant today as it was 75+ years ago. Or even more now in a divided world.
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