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In 1942 Viktor Frankl was sent to a Nazi concentration camp. Before his arrest he was a respected psychiatrist in Vienna with a family and a manuscript that represented years of work. At the camp his head was shaved, his clothes were taken, and he was given the number 119,104. One of the hardest moments came when the Nazis found his manuscript and burned it in front of him. He had been offered a visa to the United States, but his elderly parents could not go with him. He chose to stay. He was moved through several camps, including Auschwitz and Dachau. As a physician he watched the people around him. Physical strength alone did not decide who survived. Some who looked healthy declined quickly. Others who seemed too weak continued. When prisoners lost all hope, they sometimes deteriorated rapidly. Frankl returned again and again to a line from Nietzsche: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” Although the manuscript was gone, he began reconstructing it in his mind. He pictured himself after the war, standing in front of students and explaining what he had seen. He also thought constantly about his wife, Tilly. He had no way of knowing whether she was alive, but remembering her helped him continue. He tried to give the same sense of purpose to other prisoners. He would ask who was waiting for them outside or what work only they could finish. When the camps were liberated in 1945, Frankl weighed 85 pounds. Then he learned that his wife, parents, and brother were all dead. The family he had stayed for was gone. Within nine days he recreated the manuscript the Nazis had burned. The book became *Man’s Search for Meaning*. Early publishers rejected it. Readers gradually found it. It became one of the most influential books of the twentieth century. Frankl remarried, raised a daughter, climbed mountains, and continued working as a psychiatrist and teacher until his death in 1997. The Nazis had taken his possessions, destroyed his work, and reduced him to a number. They had not taken away his ability to search for meaning. He entered the camps with a career, a family, and a manuscript, and emerged having lost nearly all of them. What he carried forward was the belief that suffering does not have to be the final word.