Viktor Frankl, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, and the Power of Having a Why

Takeaways

• A why to live can outlast any darkness.

• Viktor Frankl tore up his own escape to honor his parents.

• He dictated Man's Search for Meaning in just nine days.

• Fellow hostages say Hersh Goldberg-Polin repeated Frankl's words daily in the Gaza tunnels.

• Suffering never gets the final word.

Picture a man handed a ticket out of a burning city, with his parents' lives as the price. Viktor Frankl faced that choice in 1941. More than eighty years later, his words traveled into a Hamas tunnel in Gaza, carried by a 23-year-old named Hersh.

A Visa, a Marble Fragment, and a Father's Voice

Viktor Frankl was born in Vienna in 1905 and became a respected psychiatrist and neurologist. When Nazi Germany annexed Austria, he received a visa to the United States. His elderly parents could not go with him.

At home, he spotted a piece of marble his father had rescued from Vienna's burned synagogue. It came from a tablet of the Ten Commandments and bore one Hebrew letter, tied to the words "Honor your father and your mother." Viktor let the visa expire.

Into the Camps

That decision led him to Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and other Nazi camps. His father died in Theresienstadt, and his mother, brother, and wife Tilly were murdered. Viktor survived, and he turned that loss into a message of hope.

Behind the wire, he studied the men around him as a doctor would. He held onto a line from Nietzsche: "He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how." Frankl gave that sentence its enduring moral weight.

Nine Days That Reached the World

In 1946, Frankl dictated Man's Search for Meaning in only nine days. The book recounts the camps and introduces logotherapy, his conviction that the deepest human drive is meaning.

Nazis could take a prisoner's home, family, freedom, and even name. They could never take the freedom to choose one's inner attitude. By Frankl's death in 1997, the book had sold more than 10 million copies in 24 languages, and a 1991 Library of Congress survey ranked it among the ten most influential books in America.

Hersh's Message in the Tunnels

On October 7, 2023, Hamas kidnapped Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an Israeli-American, from the Nova music festival and held him in Gaza. Fellow hostages later recalled that Hersh repeatedly shared a line he had learned from Frankl's book: "He who has a why can bear any how."

In a place built to crush hope, Hersh went through the tunnels telling everyone, "When you have a why, you will find the how." The hostages turned it into a daily mantra and asked one another, "What is our why?"

Released hostage Or Levy, who was held with Hersh, later told Jon and Rachel about those moments. In a recent Instagram post, Levy recalled Hersh telling him that line on his "52nd day of captivity," and said it "accompanied me ever since and to this day, and perhaps thanks to it, I was able to survive this terrible inferno."

Surviving hostages have said the words kept their spirits alive underground. A Holocaust survivor's sentence, born in Nazi camps, sustained Jewish hostages in terror tunnels more than 75 years later.

Hersh was murdered in Gaza in late August 2024, along with five other hostages. His message outlived him, and it keeps traveling.

Why This Message Matters Today

For Jews and people of faith everywhere, Frankl's story affirms a biblical truth: suffering never gets the final word. We cannot control every trial, though we can choose how we answer it, with prayer, dignity, love, and hope.

Israel's hostages were sons and daughters, friends and believers, people who carried light into places designed to extinguish it. Remembering Frankl and Hersh together calls us to stand with the Jewish people, pray for every hostage's return, and refuse to let hatred define the future.

Frankl survived the camps. Hersh did not survive captivity. Both left the same inheritance: when everything else is taken, the human spirit can still choose meaning, and that choice becomes a light for others.

A reminder that even in the darkest moments, life can still hold meaning.