Prisoner 119104

Joachim De Posada

By Joachim De Posada

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Prisoner 119104

 

A gentleman I admired tremendously named Viktor Frankl lived to the young age of 92. Out of all those years he was fortunate to live, three of them were spent in a German concentration camp. Those years were practically stolen by the Nazis and as you all know my dear readers, time lost can’t be recovered.

 

As bad as that fact is, those lost years have no comparison to what the Nazis took away from Viktor and destroyed: His wonderful bride and unborn child, she was a few months pregnant, his mother and father, his brother and the manuscript of a book he had practically devoted his whole life to writing and didn’t have a copy.

 

How could a man that suffered so much choose victory over defeat in the midst of so much sadness, suffering, heartbreak and unimaginable emotions?

How could he chose not to be subjugated by his captors, how to win instead of lose?

 

How come he didn’t lose faith in mankind and hate his captors after what they had done to his family and were doing to him?

 

The answer to those questions and others I had are in a book written some time ago by Viktor Frankl, which I read and loved and which by the way, he wrote in nine successive days after he was liberated. In other words, the manuscript stolen from him by the Nazis which took him years to write, he wrote, adding this prison experience in just nine consecutive days.

 

That book, I am sure some of you have read, is titled: “Man’s Search for Meaning”

In the book and what I want to share with you today, he writes:

 

“Everything can be taken away from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms, to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way”.

 

That is a profound thought he shared with all of us.

 

Some people have lost their homes, their cars, their jobs in this recession, (depression if it hit you) that has practically affected the whole world including and severely Puerto Rico and the United States. 

 

The recession might have taken everything away from you and you might be reading this newspaper right now because you found it in a garbage can thrown away by someone that could afford to buy it, read it and throw it away.

 

You might have lost a lot and I sympathize with you my friend but compare it to what Viktor lost.

 

Is there a comparison?

 

I think it is safe to say that Viktor lost much more and he didn’t let his circumstances defeat him, he didn’t quit, he never gave up. He survived and not only survived but took notes on what was happening in the concentration camp in order to someday write a book about it.

 

In other words, he couldn’t die, he had to survive because he had to write that book to help us cope with circumstances that will definitely affect all of us sometime in our lives.

 

I wish that this article could be read by a dear friend named Richard who graduated from my High School, the Sacred Heart Academy in Santurce, same year than I did,  and who I was told was homeless asking for money in a red light somewhere in Rio Piedras.  Richard my friend, if Viktor Frankl did it, you can also. Reach out to me or to the dozens of your classmates that are still around and would surely give you a hand and some understanding.

 

I hope that anyone reading this article will learn such a valuable lesson Viktor Frankl taught all of us.

 

He endured humiliations even torture so that he could survive and he could send you this message, through my writing to you who I know are going through tough times.

 

Look for opportunities, reach out to family and friends, be creative and think on what you need to do in order to get out of the rut you are in today.

 

To those that are not going through tough times, lend a hand to someone that is.

Remember the ancient saying “He who holds a lantern to light the pathway of his brother sees more clearly his own”.

 

To finish this article, I remind you of the week that three important people in the world died a couple of days between them.

 

Lady Diana died on August 31, 1997. I remember well since I was in Europe on my honeymoon when it happened.

 

Viktor Frankl died on September 2^nd, 1997.

 

Mother Theresa died on September 5, 1997.

 

Some of you might remember who received the most attention, worldwide: Lady Di.

 

Not that I want to take anything away from her but I do think that Mother Theresa and Viktor Frankl deserved at least as much, if not more, recognition than her.

 

Sometimes our values and priorities are not in the exact order they should be.

 

 

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