Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist, was imprisoned in Auschwitz and studied its internees. The perfectly round spot on which we’re standing is still safe, but the clouds are moving in on us.”įrank’s message is strikingly similar to those of Holocaust survivors.
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“I see the Annex as if we were a patch of blue sky surrounded by menacing black clouds.
It means letting go of the outcome and engaging in the process of living.
Survival by surrender means accepting the fact that you might die, while simultaneously embracing, and trying to extend, the life you have. She exhibited a classic ability to survive through surrender. In her very last entry, she talks of her “ability to appreciate the lighter side of things.”įrank recognized the reality of her situation, she could see her own impending doom, and yet she was determined to go on with her life. At one point she wrote up a “Prospectus and Guide to the Secret Annex,” as if it were a resort, advertising it as “open all year round.” She described the diet as “low fat.” Their food was running out, and Frank had begun to starve, yet she was still making jokes.
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She drank in the beauty of the natural world, looking out the windows at the sky and writing, “I firmly believe that nature can bring comfort to all who suffer.” And, like so many wilderness survivors, Frank had a sense of humor that sustained her. “We live in a paradise compared to the Jews who aren’t in hiding,” she wrote.
She rejoiced in life, as long-term survivors always do. It kept her going and gave meaning, direction, and coherence to an otherwise insane existence. Anne worked hard at establishing a normal life under such remarkable circumstances, and in her effort we find a true survivor.įrank saw her captivity as a chance to face “the difficult task of improving self,” and as she worked steadily through the days and weeks, she “discovered an inner happiness underneath superficial and cheerful exterior.” Directed action is always essential to this sort of super-living. The two families had to get used to an entirely new way of living, where at any moment they could be discovered and killed. When Germany invaded the Netherlands in 1942, the Franks, along with the van Pels family, hid from the Nazis on the top two floors of the Amsterdam office building where Anne’s father, Otto Frank, once worked. Her story describes survival as an act of grace under pressure-super-living, you could call it. While the common translation of supervivere is “to outlive,” Frank’s diary suggests that supervivere means something infinitely richer. The word is derived from the Latin supervivere, a combination of super (over) and vivere (to live). Her Diary of a Young Girl, published after her death, reminds us that in some cases survival is not simply a matter of how long you live, but how well you live.įrank’s birthday is a good time to contemplate what it means, really, to survive. Hers was an extraordinary act of survival, in which the process of living was far more important than the outcome. If she had lived, Anne Frank would have turned 80 this June.
Text by Contributing Editor Laurence Gonzales, author of the books Everyday Survival and Deep Survival Illustration by Marc Yankus How a young girl hiding in an attic, writing in her journal, transcended what it means to survive.