Soup In Man's Search For Meaning

After hours of forced labor under brutal and demanding conditions from the Nazi guards, the prisoners in the concentration camps lined up for one scoop of soup. The prisoners hoped for the best scoop; one filled with peas and not just the watery broth in order to push past the hunger for the rest of the day. The bodies of the prisoners withered away with the lack of key nutrients needed to remain in a healthy state. They did not know when their next meal would come and soup was the only element keeping them alive. The watery soup the Holocaust prisoner’s receive in Victor E. Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning symbolizes the struggle to stay alive and the lack of hope present. Throughout the novel, Frankl utilizes soup as a symbol in order to

As long as a prisoner had a cup of soup daily, they knew they were alive even though death surrounded them. However, soup is not a sufficient hope because it does not ultimately combat apathy therefore a greater ambition is needed. A journalist states that, “According to Frankl, once a prisoner had been in the camp for a significant amount of time he or she would begin to blunt his or her emotions in order to protect the self” (Adamczyk 71). Remaining insensitive was a key technique that enabled them to endure the pain each day without letting emotions drag them down. Frankl further displays the apathetical qualities the prisoners possessed by stating, “The corpse which had just been removed stared in at me with glazed eyes. Two hours before I had spoken to that man. Now I continued sipping my soup” (Frankl 23). The soup within this context also shows how they were now accustomed to death, further decreasing their hope because death was all they witnessed and they knew they could potentially become the next victim. For the prisoner’s to worry about their next meal or about their acquaintances within the camps was unnecessary because these aspects were not in their