The icy wind whistled at the prisoners’ backs, pushing through the threadbare rags their captors called clothing. They shivered as they marched, stumbling over stones, sloshing through freezing puddles. The guards shouted, “Left-two-three-four, Left-two-three-four,” and drove the men with rifle butts when they slowed or slipped in the mud.
Occasionally Prisoner Number 119,104 dared to glance at the stars fading into the pink edges of the horizon. Suddenly the man next to him whispered, "If our wives could see us now! I do hope they are better off in their camps and don't know what is happening to us."
When he heard these words, Viktor Frankl, Prisoner Number 119,104, no longer saw the fading stars or felt the icy water bite his ankles. Instead he saw the sparkling dark eyes and curly black hair of his wife Tilly, who reminded him of a Spanish dancer. He saw Tilly smile, saw her look at him with encouragement. Her caring look shone brighter for him than the sun that was beginning to light the sky.
Viktor thought then of the thousands of songs and poems that say that love is the highest and best in people. When he least expected it, on the muddy path from the concentration camp barracks to the ditch that he and the other prisoners would be digging that day, Viktor Frankl felt that for the first time in his life he fully understood the immense power of love.
The day wore on, and it seemed to be the same as every other day in the concentration camp: prisoners fell and were beaten by the guards; the men, with little food in their stomachs, hacked at the frozen ground with worn-out tools; they heard the guards shout at them, calling them pigs. Inside Viktor, though, something had changed. He spent the day dreaming that he was talking with Tilly. He asked her questions, and she responded. She questioned him, and he answered.
At one point during the day it occurred to Viktor that he didn't even know if Tilly was still alive. The last time he had seen her was at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Poland. He remembered how gracefully she had calmed the other prisoners on the way from the Theresienstadt camp to Auschwitz... Viktor realized as he struggled to break the icy ground with his shovel that he didn't need to know whether or not Tilly was alive. He knew that love goes far beyond the physical person who is loved. In that moment love was his salvation...
