In 1942, a Viennese doctor named Viktor Frankl was deported with his family to Theresienstadt.
Over the next three years he passed through four camps, including Auschwitz. His father died at Theresienstadt. His mother and his brother were murdered at Auschwitz. His wife, Tilly, died in Bergen-Belsen. By the time he was liberated, almost everything a person can lose had been taken from him: his family, his work, his home, his freedom.
And yet, when he came to write about it, in a book he finished in about nine days, the scene he chose to put at the centre wasn't about what had been taken. It was about bread.
"We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms".
He goes on to name that freedom in his own words: "to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."
What did Viktor Frankl mean by the last human freedom?
Frankl meant that even when everything outside a person is taken, one freedom remains: how they meet what is happening to them. He saw it in the men who gave away their last bread in the camps. It isn't a technique for feeling better. It's the discovery that something in a person can't be confiscated.
I want to be careful here, because this is sacred ground. Frankl's book isn't a motivational story, and nothing I write should make it sound like one. It's a witness statement from one of the darkest places human beings have made. What I take from it, I take with respect.
What did those men in the huts have that others didn't?
Not more food. Not more strength. They had exactly what everyone else had, and in many cases less.
What they had was a relationship to their own situation that the situation couldn't dictate. Everything around them said: survive, grab, protect yourself, there isn't enough. And in some of them, underneath all of that, something else chose. Not because they'd been trained to, but because it was there.
Frankl's point, as I read it, is that this freedom wasn't a heroic addition. It was what remained when everything else had been stripped away. The camps took possessions, status, family, health, dignity in every outward sense. And in some people, what was left underneath all that was not nothing. It was the self that could still give.
That's the turn in this story, and it's the opposite of what we're usually taught. We think freedom is something we build, with enough money, safety and control. Frankl saw it survive in the one place where all of those had gone.
What does that have to do with a life that isn't in crisis?
More than it seems, and I want to say this gently.
Most of us will never face anything like what Frankl faced. But almost everyone knows the feeling of being run by circumstances. The boss's mood decides your evening. A message decides your day. An old hurt decides how you walk into a room. We come to believe that how we feel is simply what happens to us.
Frankl's witness says: there's a place in you that isn't decided by circumstances. It's quieter than the noise, and it's often buried under years of reaction, conditioning and old charge. But it's there. You don't have to build it. You have to uncover it.
That's the pattern his life points to, in the language I use in my own work. The freedom is in the removal.
Have I ever lost almost everything myself?
Nothing like what Frankl lost, and I'd never put the two side by side. But I know what it is to reach the bottom of my own life.
After a war, years abroad and a bankruptcy, I hit rock bottom. I had real thoughts of giving up, not in the business sense but in the most literal one. I considered myself a failure. I blamed the world and everyone in it. And then, despite all of it, hope came from nowhere, and I took one more step.
I'm not telling you that to compare. I'm telling you because when I later read Frankl, I recognised the direction he was pointing in. What changed my life wasn't getting things back. It was discovering what was still there when so much had gone.
If you're somewhere dark right now, please don't hold it alone. Speak to someone today: a doctor, a crisis line where you live, or a person you trust.
How can I find what can't be taken from me?
This one is best done with a pen, somewhere quiet, and it takes about fifteen minutes.
Draw a line down the middle of a page. On the left, write: things I have. List everything you'd normally use to describe your life: your work, your relationships, your home, your health, your reputation, your plans. Take your time.
On the right, write: things I am, that none of those could take.
This column is harder. Most people stare at it for a while. Don't fill it with qualities you'd like to have. Look for what's actually been there through every change on the left. The capacity to care. The ability to notice. The one who has been there through every job, every loss, every move. Something that has chosen, again and again, even on bad days, to keep going.
When you've written even one line on the right, read it aloud. Then look back at the left side and notice something: every item there could change tomorrow, and the right side would still be yours.
That's a small taste of what Frankl saw in the huts.
Is choosing your attitude the same as positive thinking?
No, not as I read him.
Nothing in his account asks anyone to pretend. The men in the huts weren't telling themselves everything was fine. They were starving, in one of the worst places human beings have ever made, and they knew it. What they chose wasn't a cheerful story about their situation. It was how to be within it.
That's very different from the positive thinking that's so often sold today, where you're told to replace a dark thought with a bright one and feel better. That approach tends to fail, because it adds a new thought on top of an old feeling and hopes the new one wins.
The freedom Frankl describes sits underneath thinking altogether. It's closer to a stance than a thought. And in my experience, what most often gets in the way of that stance isn't a shortage of positive thoughts. It's old charge and conditioning that fire before any choice is possible. When those are removed, people often find they have far more choice than they believed. It's the same ground I write about in how to stop feeling like a victim.
Why do I call this work removal rather than strength?
Because the freedom Frankl witnessed wasn't manufactured under pressure. It was revealed by it.
Most of what gets in the way of that freedom in ordinary life isn't lack of willpower. It's the build-up of years: conditioning that tells you who you have to be, old emotional charge that fires before you can choose, survival identities that took over the steering long ago. None of that is who you are. All of it can come off.
I wrote a book about exactly this, called Unbecome. It isn't about Frankl, and I'd never claim his story for my work. But it's about the same direction: not adding more to a person, but removing what stands between them and what can't be taken.
If this piece has stayed with you, there's a longer reflection on the idea underneath it in what it means to unbecome.
And the next time a circumstance seems to decide everything about how you feel, pause for one breath and ask: what here is still mine to choose?
Robert Simic, guiding the remembering.