I closed Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning” for the second time. Exactly twenty years after the first. This time with an uncomfortable knot in my stomach. Here was a book universally praised, held up as one of the most profound works on human resilience. One that undeniably shaped my worldview when I first encountered it. This time something felt deeply wrong. Not with Frankl as a person, not with his suffering, but with the entire edifice of meaning he had constructed from it.
The book felt too clean. Horrific suffering transformed into neat psychological principles, one person’s coping mechanism offered as universal wisdom. The meaning Frankl found was less discovery than invention, less truth than necessary fiction.
The Problem with Survival Stories
Frankl’s narrative suffers from the most fundamental bias in Holocaust literature: survivorship bias. We hear his story precisely because he lived to tell it. The vast majority who didn’t survive, almost everyone, leave us with what researchers call “the sampling error of incomplete data.” Those who died cannot tell us about their meaning-making, their psychological resilience, or their reasons for living.
Academic research reveals the uncomfortable truth: survival in the concentration camps depended overwhelmingly on factors beyond individual control. Which transport you were on, which camp you ended up at, what job you were assigned, whether you got sick at the wrong time, the whims of particular guards, liberation timing. These determined who lived and who died far more than psychological frameworks or will to meaning. Individual frameworks can influence the outcome. When mind gives up, body gives up. Any individually induced margins of survival vanish. But holding on to life does not give any meaning to what is happening.
Frankl acknowledges this to some degree, but his framework inevitably suggests that survival was somehow more merit-based than it actually was. When he writes about choosing one’s attitude toward suffering, maintaining hope for reunion with his wife, or finding purpose in potential future work, he’s reverse-engineering significance from what was largely arbitrary, with no way to know whether a different orientation would have changed the outcome. The book works better as psychology than as autobiography. This reveals the gap between what happened and what Frankl needed to believe happened.
Real-Time Truth: The Oneg Shabbat Archives
If we want to understand how people actually experienced the Holocaust as it was happening, we need to look at contemporary documentation rather than post-war meaning-making. The most extraordinary example is Emanuel Ringelblum’s Oneg Shabbat archive in the Warsaw Ghetto.
Ringelblum was a historian who understood that what was happening was unprecedented and required documentation. Starting in November 1940, he organized a clandestine network of dozens of contributors: historians, writers, rabbis, social workers. They systematically documented every aspect of ghetto life. They collected essays, diaries, drawings, posters, photographs, even tram tickets and sweet wrappers. Everything that could bear witness to what was happening.
This was not meaning-making. This was truth-telling.
Ringelblum’s approach was methodologically sophisticated and intentionally anti-interpretive. The mission was to gather materials and documents relating to the martyrology of the Jews in Poland. As contributor Rachel Auerbach put it: “to compose an indictment against the murderers.” The watchword was “to live with honor and die with honor.” Not to find meaning in suffering, but to ensure the truth would survive even if they didn’t.
When nineteen-year-old David Graber buried the first cache of documents in August 1942, he wrote: “What we were unable to cry and shriek out to the world we buried in the ground. I would love to see the moment in which the great treasure will be dug up and scream the truth at the world. So the world may know all…We may now die in peace. We fulfilled our mission.”
This is what authentic response to meaningless horror looks like: not the construction of meaning, but the preservation of truth. Not psychological frameworks, but raw documentation. Not life lessons, but witness-bearing.
Reading these contemporary accounts, buried in milk cans and metal boxes, recovered decades later, reveals people focused on documenting horror, trying to survive another day, grieving their losses, and hoping someone would remember what happened. They weren’t finding transcendent meaning or choosing their attitudes toward suffering. They were trying to stay human in an inhuman situation and ensure the truth would survive.
The Absurd Alternative
Albert Camus published “The Myth of Sisyphus” in October 1942, the same month Frankl arrived at Theresienstadt. Camus offers a radically different framework for understanding meaningless suffering. For Camus, “the absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.” Unlike Frankl, who constructs meaning from suffering, Camus argues we must accept the futility of searching for meaning in an incomprehensible universe.
Camus wrote his essay explicitly against existentialist meaning-making approaches, targeting those who “deify what crushes them and find reason to hope in what impoverishes them.” This precisely describes Frankl’s project: acknowledging meaningless suffering then constructing a therapeutic framework from it.
Instead, Camus offers revolt without hope. Sisyphus is condemned to push his boulder up the mountain for eternity, but he conquers through “scorn,” by acknowledging the truth rather than fleeing into false meaning. “One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” Camus writes, not because he found meaning in his punishment, but because he accepted its meaninglessness with revolt and authenticity.
This framework helps us understand why Ringelblum’s approach feels more honest than Frankl’s. Ringelblum’s documentation represents exactly what Camus advocates: facing “the constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity” through “revolt” that “challenges the world anew every second.” Like Sisyphus, Ringelblum continued his work without hope of changing the fundamental absurdity of the situation. He documented reality not to find meaning in it, but to bear witness to meaningless horror.
The False Comfort Problem
What makes Frankl’s book particularly troubling is how it’s been received and used. It has become a touchstone for “how to handle suffering,” assigned in therapy courses, quoted in self-help contexts, used to suggest that all suffering can be made meaningful if you just have the right attitude. This isn’t just intellectually dishonest. It’s potentially harmful to people going through their own tragedies.
The book offers false comfort by suggesting that meaning can always be extracted from suffering. But sometimes terrible things happen for no reason, and the healthiest response isn’t to manufacture meaning but to acknowledge the senselessness and find ways to live despite it, not because of it.
We live in a culture that desperately wants suffering to have meaning. We turn trauma into growth opportunities, tragedies into life lessons, pain into wisdom. This cultural tendency explains why Frankl’s book resonates so deeply. His mythologizing of suffering serves a function beyond comfort. It allows us to avoid confronting the fundamental absurdity and injustice of much human pain. If suffering always has meaning, if we can always learn and grow from trauma, then we don’t have to face the more difficult truth: that much of human suffering is simply senseless. Ringelblum’s archives force us to confront this. They show us people trying to document and survive horror, not transform it into meaning. They preserve the voices of those who knew they were probably going to die but wanted the truth to survive. They represent a different kind of response to extreme suffering: not meaning-making, but truth-telling.
When Tragedy Is Simply Tragedy
This is why Frankl’s book feels false to me. Not because his suffering wasn’t real, not because his psychological framework didn’t help him, but because it transforms meaningless tragedy into meaningful experience, absurd horror into life lessons, senseless suffering into wisdom. It offers comfort where honesty might serve us better.
“To the dumb question ‘Why me?’ the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?” Christopher Hitchens, Mortality
Sometimes we need to sit with the uncomfortable truth that terrible things happen for no reason. Sometimes we need to bear witness to horror without transforming it into meaning. Sometimes we need to acknowledge that the universe is largely indifferent to human suffering and that the most authentic response is not to find purpose in pain but to document truth, preserve memory, and live as fully as we can in the face of absurdity.
Comforting narratives are a panacea for those terrified of confronting a world that does not care or even bother. A more honest way to be human is to reject the false hope that suffering serves a purpose. It does not.
Perhaps, like Sisyphus, we must imagine ourselves happy not because we’ve found meaning in our boulder, but because we’ve learned to push it anyway.
Sources
- The Oneg Shabbat Archive – United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- The Ringelblum Archive – Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw
- Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), translated by Justin O’Brien
- Christopher Hitchens, Mortality (2012)
- Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (1946)
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