— The Last of Human Freedoms —

When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.

Viktor Frankl

About the Author

Viktor Emil Frankl (1905–1997) was born in Vienna into a Jewish family that took ideas seriously — his father had taught himself to read by copying letters from a prayer book by candlelight, one letter at a time. From boyhood Viktor was fascinated by the human mind, writing to Sigmund Freud as a teenager and receiving a personal reply. He trained as a psychiatrist and neurologist, and while still a young man he developed what he called logotherapy — a form of psychotherapy built on a single, unfashionable premise: the deepest human drive is not pleasure, as Freud believed, and not power, as Adler believed, but meaning.
He was about to test that theory in the most extreme conditions imaginable.
In 1942, Frankl and his family were arrested and deported to Nazi concentration camps. He passed through Auschwitz, Kaufering, and Türkheim. His mother was killed at Auschwitz. His brother died in a labor camp. His wife Tilly died at Bergen-Belsen weeks before liberation. Of his immediate family, only he and his sister survived.
What happened inside him during those years became the foundation of the most widely read book about human suffering written in the twentieth century. Within nine days of liberation, he dictated Man’s Search for Meaning — not as an act of bitterness, but as testimony. He wanted the world to know what he had seen: that even in a place designed to strip away everything human, something remained that no guard could confiscate.
He returned to Vienna. He rebuilt his practice. He earned a pilot’s license at sixty-seven. He climbed an Alpine peak at eighty. He lectured on five continents and received twenty-nine honorary doctoral degrees. He was a man who had earned every word he ever wrote — and he knew it, and he never let you forget how much those words had cost.

Historical Context

Frankl published Man’s Search for Meaning in 1946, one year after the liberation of the camps. He would go on to say that he almost did not write it — that he intended it to be published anonymously, a document without an author’s name attached, because he feared it would read like self-promotion. A friend convinced him otherwise.
The sentence we are sitting with today — “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves” — is the distillation of what he witnessed, not as a philosopher watching from a distance, but as a prisoner who weighed what it meant each morning. He watched men in the most abject conditions — starving, dying, robbed of everything — and he noticed something that neither Marx nor Darwin had predicted: that the men who survived with their souls intact were not always the strongest. They were the ones who found, or held onto, a reason. The ones who still believed, even in a cattle car, that something was being asked of them by life, and that they still had a choice about how to answer.
The freedom he describes is the last freedom — the one no regime, no illness, no loss can legislate away. You cannot choose your diagnosis. You cannot choose your grief. You cannot always choose your circumstances. But the space between what happens to you and how you respond — that space, however narrow it becomes, belongs to you. Frankl saw men protect that space with their lives. Some of them lost their lives protecting it. He decided it was worth writing down.

A Story to Sit With

In the winter of 1944, in the camp at Kaufering, Frankl was assigned to dig trenches in frozen ground. His hands were cracked and bleeding. The guards shouted at men who slowed. A fellow prisoner beside him whispered something — Frankl could not quite hear it, the wind was too sharp. He asked the man to repeat himself. The man said: I was thinking about my wife.
Frankl wrote later that in that moment, in a flash of clarity that he could not explain and could not have predicted, he understood something. Love — the act of holding another person fully present in your mind — was itself a form of freedom that the camp could not touch. He thought of his own wife. He did not know if she was alive. He thought of her face. He wrote: “A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth — that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire.”
He dug the frozen ground. He thought of his wife. He chose — in the one cubic inch of space they had not yet taken from him — to love. That was the last of human freedoms. He exercised it in a labor camp in Bavaria, in the middle of winter, with bleeding hands.

Scripture Cross-Links

2 Nephi 2:27 — “Wherefore, men are free according to the flesh… they are free to choose liberty and eternal life… or to choose captivity and death.”
Romans 8:28 — “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God.”
Doctrine and Covenants 122:7 — “All these things shall give thee experience, and shall be for thy good.”
Job 1:21 — “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”
Moroni 7:48 — “Wherefore, my beloved brethren, pray unto the Father with all the energy of heart, that ye may be filled with this love.”

Thematic Reflection

There is a word Frankl used that does not translate cleanly from the German — Trotzdem, which means something like “in spite of everything” or “nevertheless.” He believed that a fully human life was possible trotzdem — in spite of everything, nevertheless, even so. Not because the suffering goes away. Not because the situation changes. But because the person inside the situation has refused to be reduced to the situation.
We are not, most of us, in a Nazi concentration camp. But we are all, at some point, in situations we cannot change — a diagnosis, a loss, a relationship that has broken beyond repair, a door that will not open no matter how many times we knock. The question Frankl asks is quiet and serious: What are you going to do with the space between that wall and your soul?
You cannot always choose your circumstances. You can always choose your character. This is not a comfortable idea — it places a quiet but serious responsibility on each of us. If even Viktor Frankl had that freedom in the worst conditions imaginable, then so do we — in our grief, our illness, our disappointment, our long ordinary days when life refuses to go as planned. The freedom has always been there. It is the last one they can take. Do not surrender it before they ask.

Richard’s Personal Reflection

I have sat at the bedsides of patients who were out of options. The treatment had failed, or the body had simply worn through its last good season, and there was nothing left in my bag that could change what was coming. Those were the hardest visits I made in thirty years of medicine — not because death frightened me, but because I never knew, walking through the door, whether I would find a person who had given themselves entirely to the disease, or one who had somehow found, in the space Frankl describes, a way to remain themselves.
I remember one man — a retired schoolteacher, in his late seventies, facing a diagnosis that left him perhaps three months. His wife sat beside him, holding his hand. I had braced myself for the conversation. Instead, he asked me about my own children — how old they were, whether they liked school. He made a small joke. He told me he had decided to spend the time he had writing letters to each of his former students whose names he could remember. He had been at it for a week and had already written forty-three.
He could not change his situation. He had changed himself — or perhaps, more accurately, he had remained himself, so completely that the disease could not get a foothold in his soul.
That is what Frankl means. I have seen it. It is real.

Grandfather’s Counsel

My dear ones, there will come a time — perhaps more than once — when you will face a wall that will not move. A door that will not open. A loss you did not choose and cannot undo. When that day comes, I want you to remember this: the last freedom is yours, and no one can take it.
President Hinckley lost his mother at age eight. He served a discouraged mission during the Great Depression. He faced the indifference of a world largely uninterested in what he had to offer — for years. What he could change, what he did change, was his focus. He turned outward. He chose to grow rather than shrink. He chose to remain himself.
You will face walls that will not move. When you do, remember that you are not reduced to the wall. There is still a space between what happened and who you are — and in that space, you are free. What you do with that freedom is the truest thing about you. Choose well, and keep choosing. That is your inheritance. Claim it.

EXCERPT (3–4 sentences):
In the winter of 1944, a Viennese psychiatrist named Viktor Frankl stood in a Nazi labor camp with bleeding hands, digging frozen ground — and made one of the most important discoveries in the history of human thought. He found that even when everything else is taken away, one freedom remains: the freedom to choose who you will be inside your circumstances. This entry explores Frankl’s timeless insight, the story behind it, and what it means for each of us when we face walls that will not move. Come sit a while and consider the last of human freedoms.