◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

The Last Freedom I was a psychiatrist in Vienna, in the city of Freud and Adler, and I had a way out. When the Nazis came, I held a visa to America in my hand. I let it expire, because my old parents could not come with me, and I would not leave them. That was the first thing the camps taught me, before I ever saw one: that a man is defined by what he is willing to be responsible for. They took me anyway — to Theresienstadt, to Auschwitz, to the work camps after. They murdered my father, my mother, my brother, and my wife. They took the manuscript I had sewn into the lining of my coat, my life's work, and they destroyed it. They shaved us, numbered us, and set out, with terrible method, to prove to us that we were no longer men but animals to be worked and discarded. And there, in the one place on earth designed to strip a human being of everything, I learned the thing I came back to tell the living. They could take everything, and they took it. But there was one freedom they could not take, and I watched men keep it even walking to their deaths: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's own attitude in any circumstance, to choose one's own way. The guards owned my body. They did not own my response to them. That freedom cannot be confiscated. It can only be surrendered. Understand me precisely. I am not telling you that you are living in my Germany. You are not. I am telling you about the grammar underneath it — the part that begins long before any camp, in the soul of an ordinary person, and that is therefore still entirely yours to refuse. I learned that a man can survive almost any how if he has a why. The ones who collapsed were not the physically weakest. They were the ones who had lost their why — who could no longer see a future, a task, a face waiting for them. Once the why was gone, the how crushed them quickly. This is what should make you watchful. I spent my life afterward naming a sickness of the free world that the camps did not cause but laid bare: the vacuum that opens in a person who has no meaning of his own. And I will tell you what rushes into that vacuum, every time, when a person will not fill it himself. Two things. Conformity — doing what everyone else does. And totalitarianism — doing what a strong man tells you. The demagogue is not selling you a program. He is selling you a meaning, ready-made, to pour into your emptiness: a flag to feel large behind, and an enemy to feel righteous against. It is a counterfeit of the true thing, and the empty buy it gladly. And here is what I know that contradicts everything the dividers will tell you. In the camps I learned that there are only two races of human beings. Not the ones they painted on us. The decent and the indecent. And they are found everywhere — among the guards and among the prisoners, in every nation and party and group. The line that matters does not run between you and them. It runs straight through the middle of every group there is — and straight through the middle of you. So hear a man who was reduced to a number and came back. They can take a great deal. My century showed precisely how much. But the last freedom — to choose what you will be in the face of it — they cannot take. You can only hand it over. Do not hand it over. Find your own meaning, before they sell you theirs. And choose, each day, which of the two races you will belong to.