4 ideas
Everything can be taken from a person except the freedom to choose their attitude in any given set of circumstances. Between stimulus and response there remains a space in which the prisoner decides whether to become the plaything of circumstance or to keep an inner dignity, and that decision, not the conditions, determines what kind of person they become.
Frankl reports that between Christmas 1944 and New Year's 1945 deaths in his camp rose sharply beyond anything seen before. The camp doctor attributed it not to worse work, food or weather but to prisoners' naive hope of being home by Christmas collapsing, and that sudden loss of hope destroyed the resistance they had left.
Logotherapy holds that meaning is found in three ways: by creating a work or doing a deed, by experiencing something or loving someone, and by the attitude taken toward unavoidable suffering. The third applies only when suffering cannot be changed; suffering that can be removed should be removed, and bearing it needlessly is masochism, not heroism.
Frankl inverts the question of meaning: instead of asking what we can expect from life, we should ask what life expects from us, and answer through concrete action rather than talk. Prisoners who held onto a specific future obligation, such as a child waiting abroad or an unfinished book, were better able to endure because a 'why' made almost any 'how' bearable.