I believe everyone should experience the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, or, more preferably, the Yad Vashem (World Holocaust Remembrance Center) in Jerusalem. Both these places will profoundly change the soul of any who enter. For inside is nothing less than to stare into the darkest depths of humanity.

I read Man’s Search for Meaning for the first time last year, and for me it radically clarified the bleakness of the Holocaust. I am somewhat familiar with the literature on the Holocaust, having read Wiesel’s Night, Dawn, Day trilogy, Szpilman's The Pianist, Browning’s Ordinary Men, and so forth. I did my graduating thesis on the horridly grim topic of the Mennonite Nazis and how those who claimed a peaceful interpretation of Christianity but then largely abandoned such views for what they thought was more expedient in the moment. Frankl’s book is a hard look at the worst of humanity; he survived multiple concentration camps and lost essentially everything in the Holocaust (including his wife and parents). He wrote the book shortly after being freed, and since he was a trained psychologist his introspection on what he experienced is uniquely potent and clear. How does one still believe life has meaning, that there is any hope for humanity, after going through something this evil? Why even care about living when everything in life has been destroyed? This is the challenge Frankl grapples with.

My generation (the millennials) has lived through the most peaceful time in the history of civilization (read Rosling’s Factfulness for the data). I was born after the Cold War ended and at the tail end of the last remaining survivors of the two world wars. Its hard for my generation to have frameworks for thinking about deeply difficult times like genocide and global war. We lack fundamental life experience of having to deal with the worst of life and still be able to say that life has meaning.

Man’s Search for Meaning helped me see all this with more clarity. I’ve been working through my notes from this book. Here’s key points that stood out, and ultimately why I believe you should visit the Holocaust Museum (and read Frankl’s book).

In the introduction, Frankl lays out the premise of his life’s work: life is a “quest for meaning.” He saw three possible sources for meaning: “in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times.”

Ultimately, the suffering he experienced in concentration camps was completely out of his control. But what he could control was his response to that suffering. “The sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone. Dostoevsky said once, ‘there is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.’”

“An active life serves the purpose of giving man the opportunity to realize value in creative work, while a passive life of enjoyment affords him the opportunity to obtain fulfillment in experiencing beauty, art, or nature. But there is also purpose in that life which is almost barren of both creation and enjoyment and which admits of but one possibility of high moral behavior: namely, in man’s attitude to his existence, an existence restricted by external forces. A creative life and a life of enjoyment are banned to him. But not only creativeness and enjoyment are meaningful. 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.”

Quoting Nietzsche: “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.” Sometimes prisoners would give up and just die. They would say “I have nothing to expect from life any more. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. 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.”

“It is apparent that the mere knowledge that a man was either a camp guard or a prisoner tells us almost nothing. Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a while it would be easy to condemn. The boundaries between groups overlapped and we must not try to simplify matters by saying that these men were angels and those were devils.” This is an identical observation to the observation Solzhenitsyn (survivor of the Soviet prisoner worker camps) makes throughout The Gulag Archipelago.

“There is a danger inherent in the teaching of man’s ‘nothingness’, the theory that man is nothing but the result of biological, psychological and sociological conditions, or the product of heredity and environment. This [is] neurotic fatalism.” Instead, “every human being has the freedom to change at any instant.”

He concludes that “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. For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best. So, let us be alert… Since Auschwitz, we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.”

Never forget: everyone “has the potential to transcend evil or insanity by making responsible choices.” What you do matters. You can choose the good. You can choose to get in the way of evil. And this is why the Holocaust Museum matters; there is evil, but there is also our ability to choose, to transform, to live a meaningful life, no matter what is happening to us. That is the lesson of Victor Frankl.

Enter the future courageously.