What trait do you think best enabled people imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps to survive?

It wasn’t strength, youth or selfishness, according to Austrian psychologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, but rather having a firm reason to live.

Frankl believed we all have within us a “will to meaning,” and that we can make it through even the most unimaginable suffering when we find a sufficient reason for living – an idea echoed in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche: “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”

After the Holocaust, Frankl created logotherapy – a psychoanalytic approach that argues life is inherently worth living and people should strive to find their own meaning. Frankl’s “Man’s Search For Meaning” gives three suggestions:

“We can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: (1) by creating a work or doing a deed [the way of achievement or accomplishment]; (2) by experiencing something or encountering someone [the way of nature and culture, and the way of love]; and (3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering.”
There are few dedicated logotherapists working today, but it’s easy to see Frankl’s influence in more modern psychological approaches like meaning therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT).