This week, we read a story by Viktor Frankl. He provides an account of his experience in the concentration camps during the Holocaust and explains the degradation of the normal human psyche when continually exposed to such inhumane conditions. It is impossible, in my opinion, to try and grasp how horrific the Holocaust was, simply because we haven't experienced something so cruel nor life- threatening in our own lives. I can't picture anyone becoming accustomed to life within the concentration camps, yet Frankl argues that humans can "get used to anything" with enough exposure. Frankl says that there are common psychological reactions to an environment that all humans go through as they become accustomed to the abnormal.
It is awful to think that with such often exposure to human cruelty and death, one can come to view other's suffering and death with dull and blunted emotion. This apathy, Frankl explains, became commonplace around the concentration camps and served as a defense mechanism for many of the prisoners. I think to destroy someone's sense of empathy is just as wrong as killing someone. Although to kill someone is utterly disgusting, to destroy someone's sense of empathy is to destroy the one characteristic that I think makes people human. Empathy is how we connect to one another, and to obliterate that sense and desensitize someone to such horrors is like killing all human-like quality. I think this has profound effects on the mental health of individuals, which makes death almost preferable to a life without emotion. The prisoners are left to imagine the essentials that once made their life enjoyable (i.e. sex, food, and love).
To torture fellow human beings in such a disgusting way of depriving them of human essentials, enhancing and prolonging the suffering that precedes their death, is atrocious. Hearing a first- hand account of these evils that plagued innocent people consistently manages to make me question just how evil humankind can be.
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