I don't like appeals to authority as a reason for giving weight to what someone argues, but in the case of Frankl, it's hard to avoid it when it comes to his di

I don't like appeals to authority as a reason for giving weight to what someone argues, but in the case of Frankl, it's hard to avoid it when it comes to his discourse about finding meaning in life and overcoming difficulty. He didn't just survive Auschwitz, he survived multiple slave labor and death camps under the most hellish of conditions such as those the Nazi monstrosity created, all while seeing the murder and destruction of virtually all his family inside that machinery of death. This included seeing his wife and daughter die too. None of this to even mention the total loss of his livelihood, everything he'd owned and the need to entirely reconstruct his life and health after surviving several years of hell. Neither was he so flexibly young as to be more resilient than some when it all happened. The man entered the world of the Nazi camps in his late 30s. Despite all this he went on to be extremely productive and lived to the age of 92. A vast number of people who fall apart through suffering do so after going over less than a minuscule fraction of the traumas this man endured and never recover afterward. His was a remarkable personality for doing the opposite after so much worse. Even Solzhenitsyn's life in the soviet GULAG was comparatively mild when held against what Frankl lived through. Primo Levi is another example that reminds me of Frankl, but he was quite a bit younger when he was put through Auschwitz.