Frankl begins his personal narrative with traveling to Auschwitz by train. He was transported with 1,500 people, with 80 people in each car. They could see enough to notice the sign for Auschwitz, which was already known as a death camp. This is when Frankl and the others felt what he labels the initial state of “shock” that characterizes every prisoner’s experience. 

Upon arriving at the camp, the important moment came when Frankl faced the first selection, which he had no way of understanding. An SS officer reviewed the prisoners as they filed up to him, and he pointed them either to his left or to his right. Frankl was pointed to the right. Only later did he learn that those who went to the left, including a friend of his, were killed immediately in the gas chambers and that only about 10% of the new prisoners survived to be kept on as enslaved laborers. 

Next came the efficient processing of the prisoner workers, in which they were stripped of their belongings, their clothes, and all of the hair on their bodies through shaving. This was the beginning of the Nazis’ attempts to dehumanize their charges and to foster fear and obedience in them. Frankl and the others received important advice from veteran prisoners on how to survive—namely, not to show any sign of injury or illness. 

Frankl describes the second psychological reaction that the prisoners experienced after the initial shock. It was a full shutdown of emotions. He describes someone blandly watching as a boy had gangrenous toes amputated: “Disgust, horror and pity are emotions that our spectator could not feel any more. The sufferers, the dying and the dead, became such commonplace sights to him after a few weeks of camp life that they could not move him any more” (14). Frankl notes that this lack of emotional response was particularly evident during the continuous beatings that the prisoners experienced or witnessed.

Later, Frankl offers his first experience of good fortune in the camp. Capos were prisoners who supervised their fellow prisoners. They were chosen for their toughness and brutal behaviors: They were often more violent than the guards in order to impress their captors and earn privileges. However, Frankl managed to befriend his Capo so that the Capo looked out for him. This was important to his survival, as in exchange for Frankl’s psychological and relationship insights, the Capo offered him extra food.

Frankl describes the inevitable effects of malnutrition on the body, which begins to eat itself, and on the mind, which becomes obsessed with thoughts and fantasies about food. Frankl was concerned that his fellow prisoners spent so much time and energy imagining food they wished they had or hoped to have at the end of the war. He felt it interfered with their ability to cope with the reality of starvation rations. 

Frankl was eventually transferred from the camp at Auschwitz to one connected with the Dachau complex. On the way, his train passed through Vienna and he saw the street where he had lived through a peephole in the train car. 

Besides food, two of the main topics of conversation were politics—specifically, the state of the war—and religion. Frankl notes that the discussion of politics was based largely on gossip and inspired anxiety. However, religion was key to the prisoners’ lives: “Most impressive in this connection were improvised prayers or services in the corner of a hut, or in the darkness of the locked cattle truck in which we were brought back from a distant work site, tired, hungry, and frozen in our ragged clothing” (19).

Around this time, Frankl had a spiritual awakening regarding the importance of love as a source of meaning in his life and in people’s lives more generally. While thinking of his wife, whose fate was unknown to him, he had an epiphany regarding the spiritual nature of love, which transcends physical circumstance and even death itself. He was thus able to draw comfort from picturing his wife, despite his uncertainty regarding where she was and how she was faring. Besides images of loved ones, the prisoners also were helped by cultivating a sense of humor in even the bleakest of circumstances—for instance, the jokes they told one another after learning that Dachau did not have a crematorium. 

Frankl was later transferred to a rest camp to work as a doctor. At the time of the transfer, he had no way of knowing if the rest camp destination was a ruse and if he and his fellows would be killed after they arrived. It turned out that Frankl did get to a rest camp, which helped him survive. Indeed, things deteriorated to such an extent in the camp he had left that the prisoners were forced to resort to cannibalism. Before he left Dachau, he felt the need to say goodbye to his friends and to “make [his] will” (28)—to tell a fellow prisoner to relay a message to his wife about his continued love and devotion. 

Toward the end of the war, when the frontline of battle got closer to the camp, Frankl had a chance to escape. However, he chose to stay with his patients rather than leave, which gave him a profound sense of “inward peace” despite the uncertainty of his fate. On Frankl’s final day of imprisonment, some of his fellow prisoners were given a ride out of the camp, but Frankl and another doctor were left behind. Frankl later learned that the men in the truck had been taken to another camp where they were locked in huts and burned to death. 

The last third of Part I begins to outline the author’s conclusions, drawn from his concentration camp experiences. In this section, the author begins to describe his reinterpretation of the Viennese psychotherapy that originated with Sigmund Freud.  

Frankl examines the psychological experience of being liberated from the camps. As he notes, the body was quick to adapt to the new freedoms, but the mind still had to adjust. He notes that depersonalization, or a sense of unreality, was common. Frankl also observed intense feelings of anger and the desire for revenge among the liberated prisoners. In one instance, he and a friend were walking and encountered a cultivated field. Frankl wanted to go around the field so as not to damage the crops. His companion was moved by his grief and his hatred toward destruction. 

Frankl knew that the liberated prisoners would need help to reintegrate into a society that had caused them bitterness, disillusionment, and great loss. Very often, when the prisoners returned home, they found no one left to meet them. He writes: “We were not hoping for happiness—it was not that that gave us courage and meaning to our suffering, our sacrifices and our dying. And yet we were not prepared for unhappiness. This disillusionment, which awaited not a small number of prisoners, was an experience which these men have found very hard to get over” (43). As a psychotherapist, Frankl saw this as a challenge to his professional practice. 

Frankl finishes Part I with his definition of the essence of liberation, which he describes as freedom from fear born of suffering.