In 1938, Germany invaded Austria. Frankl was Jewish, and under the Nazi regime he was not permitted to treat Aryan patients. The Rothschild Hospital in Vienna was the only place where Jewish patients could be treated, and so Frankl was called upon to use his talents there as head of the neurological department. While working at Rothschild, Frankl was also waiting to hear news that could lift him out of the terrifying situation that so many European Jews were in. He had applied for a visa to the United States, and just needed his lottery number to be called. He was one of the lucky ones ... his lottery number came up before Pearl Harbor and the United States' entrance into the war. But Frankl's decision to leave Austria wasn't easy.

The visa, it applied only to Frankl, and not to any other members of his family. His parents and siblings would be left behind in an ever-scarier environment, and Frankl knew their fate was likely to end in a concentration camp. Frankl knew he had a choice to make, and he opted to depend on a higher power than himself to guide him in the right direction. When he came across a fragment of a stone in his parents house, he knew he had found the answer he was looking for. The stone wasn't just any old stone - it was a piece of the Ten Commandments that had once stood in a local synagogue. Burned down by the Nazis, the Synagogue was reduced to rubble and Frankl's father had picked up a piece of the stone for the family to have. And the piece he just happened to pick up? It depicted a portion of the commandment "Honor Thy Father and Mother." To Frankl, this meant his decision was clear. He would stay in Austria with his family and be right alongside them as they dealt with the horrors the Nazis brought upon them.

And Frankl well knew the horrors the Nazis were capable of. He and his wife Tilly were married in 1941, and the two of them wanted to have children. But Jewish couples were not allowed to have children. Frankl's wife conceived, but she was not allowed to give birth. She was forced to have an abortion. Then, in 1942, what Frankl had feared would happen came true. He, his wife, and his parents were arrested. They were initially sent to Theresienstadt, a camp in Czechoslovakia. There, Frankl did what he could to help others, running a clinic, helping new prisoners cope with the drastic shock of entry into the camp, and establishing a suicide watch. Frankl, his wife, and his mother survived Theresienstadt, but his father did not. He died after only six months in the camp.

He was one of the few to survive Auschwitz. 1.3 million people were sent through the gates of Auschwitz ... and 1.1 million of them died. Those who didn't die right away in the gas chamber suffered through deaths caused by starvation and disease, exhaustion from forced labor, and even medical experiments.

Though Auschwitz was the site of a huge number of atrocities, many others suffered in other camps throughout Europe. Frankl's wife was one of those who met their fate in a different camp from her husband. Tilly perished at the hands of the Nazis at the camp known as Bergen-Belsen, and Frankl did not learn she had died until the war ended and he was liberated in 1945.

Throughout his time suffering in the camps, not knowing Tilly's fate, he was able to find meaning and a level of comfort in the knowledge of love. He thought of her throughout his ordeal in the concentration camps, and recognizing how that helped him he started to theorize about what love meant for human life. He later set out his thinking this way, in his famous work "Man's Search for Meaning," "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 highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love."

When he was in the concentration camps, Frankl had to distract himself from the reality of what he was going through. He saw death and suffering up close, he was forced into cattle cars, forced to march, contracted typhoid fever, and was separated from his most beloved family members. So what was one way he pushed himself forward to survive? As he explains, "I repeatedly tried to distance myself from the misery that surrounded me by externalising it. I remember marching one morning from the camp to the work site, hardly able to bear the hunger, the cold, and pain of my frozen and festering feet, so swollen ... My situation seemed bleak, even hopeless. Then I imagined that I stood at a lectern in a large, beautiful, warm and bright hall. I was about to give a lecture to an interested audience on "Psychotherapeutic Experiences in a Concentration Camp" (the actual title I later used ...). In the imaginary lecture I reported the things I am now living through. Believe me, ladies and gentlemen, at that moment I could not dare to hope that some day it was to be my good fortune to actually give such a lecture."

Frankl also made a point of finding a lesson in goodness and survival in the suffering he endured and the suffering he witnessed. These themes informed his life's work. "We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."