Another time, in a forest, with the temperature at 2°F, we began to dig up the topsoil, which was frozen hard, in order to lay water pipes. By then I had grown rather weak physically.
Along came a foreman with chubby rosy cheeks. His face definitely reminded me of a pig's head. I noticed that he wore lovely warm gloves in that bitter cold. For a time he watched me silently. I felt that trouble was brewing, for in front of me lay the mound of earth which showed exactly how much I had dug.
Then he began: "You pig, I have been watching you the whole time! I'll teach you to work, yet! Wait till you dig dirt with your teeth—you'll die like an animal! In two days I'll finish you off! You've never done a stroke of work in your life. What were you, swine? A businessman?"
I was past caring. But I had to take his threat of killing me seriously, so I straightened up and looked him directly in the eye. "I was a doctor—a specialist."
"What? A doctor? I bet you got a lot of money out of people."
"As it happens, I did most of my work for no money at all, in clinics for the poor."
But, now, I had said too much. He threw himself on me and knocked me down, shouting like a madman. I can no longer remember what he shouted.
I want to show with this apparently trivial story that there are moments when indignation can rouse even a seemingly hardened prisoner—indignation not about cruelty or pain, but about the insult connected with it.
That time blood rushed to my head because I had to listen to a man judge my life who had so little idea of it, a man (I must confess: the following remark, which I made to my fellow prisoners after the scene, afforded me childish relief) "who looked so vulgar and brutal that the nurse in the out-patient ward in my hospital would not even have admitted him to the waiting room."
—from Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
"What? A doctor? I bet you got a lot of money out of people."
"As it happens, I did most of my work for no money at all, in clinics for the poor."
But, now, I had said too much. He threw himself on me and knocked me down, shouting like a madman. I can no longer remember what he shouted.
I want to show with this apparently trivial story that there are moments when indignation can rouse even a seemingly hardened prisoner—indignation not about cruelty or pain, but about the insult connected with it.
That time blood rushed to my head because I had to listen to a man judge my life who had so little idea of it, a man (I must confess: the following remark, which I made to my fellow prisoners after the scene, afforded me childish relief) "who looked so vulgar and brutal that the nurse in the out-patient ward in my hospital would not even have admitted him to the waiting room."
—from Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
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