Viktor Frankl: My Wife's Face in the Frozen Dark (1975)

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:00]One morning, marching to the work site before dawn, frozen in pain, barely able to lift my feet, my mind escaped. I began to talk to my wife. Not to the woman I knew was probably dead, to the idea of her, the image I carried, her face, her voice answering me. And in that moment I understood something that the poets had always known, and that I had read but never truly felt, that love is not a feeling that depends on the presence of the beloved. Love is the highest goal a human being can aspire to.

[00:00:43]A man with nothing left in the world, no possessions, no future, no freedom, can still know bliss in the contemplation of the person he loves. The soul finds its world in the image of another. I did not know whether she was alive. It ceased to matter. Her reality inside me was more luminous than the sun that was beginning to rise over the camp.