Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl (1946)

Before dawn, a column of prisoners stumbles toward a work site in the dark, prodded by rifle butts and the cold. One of them, a psychiatrist, finds his mind turning to the face of his wife, and grasps, there of all places, that the salvation of man is through love. Viktor Frankl spent three years in the Nazi camps, lost his wife and his parents to them, and came out to write down what he had watched: that the prisoners who lasted longest were rarely the strongest, but those who still had something waiting ahead of them, a person to return to, a book to rewrite, a why the suffering had not yet cancelled. He set it all down in nine days, in prose so clinically calm it becomes its own testimony. What the camps proved, and what _Man's Search for Meaning_ extends to every ordinary life, is that pain folded inside a purpose is a different animal from pain that means nothing. If a reason to live could be found in that place, it can be found anywhere.