During the Holocaust in the 1940’s, Victor Frankel spent three years as a prisoner in the Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps. His wife, father, mother, and brother died in these camps. He was faced with extreme hunger, debilitating illnesses, and brutal living conditions. Yeah. Unlike the prisoners around him, he somehow managed to find hope and meaning during one of the most catastrophic events in human history.

It's no Wonder Man, search for meaning sold over 10 million copies and became one of the most influential books in the world. With that said, let's have a look at three powerful lessons we can learn from. Lesson one. He who has a wire to live for can bear with almost. Anyhow, Franco was confronted by a fellow inmate, let's call him Felix.

Felix shared a dream he had in February 1945. A voice told him he could wish for something, so he wished to know when he would be liberated from the concentration camp and have his sufferings come to an. The voice replied. March the 30th. Felix had a strong sense of hope and was convinced the voice in his dream was right.

As the date ticked closer, the war got worse, making it appear to be very unlikely that freedom was near. On March the 29th, Felix suddenly became ill on March the 30th, the day he expected to be free, he lost consciousness on March the 31st, he was. To paraphrase Frankel's own words, the ultimate cause of my friend's death was that the expected liberation did not come, and he was severely disappointed.

This suddenly lowered his body's resistance against the latent typhus infection. His faith in the future and his will to live had become paralyzed and his body fell victim to illness, and thus the voice of his dream was right after. To back up this case, a chief doctor of the concentration camp witnessed an increased death rate of prisoners between Christmas 1944 and New Year's 1945.

The doctor believed this was due to prisoners having false hope that that would be home again by Christmas as a time during near many lost hope and fell into an endless sleep. So, you might be asking, what can we learn from these stories? Well, Frankel sums it up by saying, any attempt to restore a man's inner strength in the camp had first to succeed in showing him some future goal.

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