Victor Frankl was one of few Jews who survived the concentration camps. Because of his survival he was able to tell his story of life in the concentration camps and find meaning in life. He expresses his thoughts and experiences in Man's Search for Meaning. Not only did he find meaning in life helped others find meaning in their own lives. Frankl describes three psychological stages which the prisoners of the camps, including him, experienced.
The first stage Victor Frankl describes is the period following his admission into the camps. Frankl says that the symptom that characterizes the first phase is shock. Though they were in shock in the first phase they did not fear death, even the gas chambers did not scare them because after all they spared them the act of committing suicide. There were many reactions in the stage of shock. First there was an endless thoughts of home and family, longing and disgust; disgust for all the ugliness and hate around them. But all these feelings were gone with in a few days. .
The second stage Victor Frankl describes is the period when he is well entrenched in camp routine. This is the phase of relative apathy, where they achieved a kind of emotional death. For example Victor Frankl was working in a hut for typhus patients, after one of them had just died, he watched without any emotional upset by the scene that fallowed, which was repeated with each death. One by one, other prisoner would approach the still warm body and grab things off of it. One man took the corpse's wooden shoes, another took his coat and even another took some string. He watched all of this with no concern and eventually he asked the nurse to remove the body. He listened to the now cold body, even the head, bump up the two steps into a room full of other dead bodies. Frankl felt no emotion from any of this which went on, much like the others in the camp. Apathy was the main symptom of the second phase; this is because it was a necessary mechanism of self-defense.