Chronicle editor and author Jerry Bellune has faced many tests of character. They’re nothing like the ones Viktor Frankl, the man he writes about this month, faced and shares in his compelling book, Man’s Search for Meaning.

Be thankful this Independence Day that we may never face the challenges Viktor Frankl did in the 1940s Nazi death camps.

Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist, faced a difficult decision in March 1938 when Nazis overran his country.

He had received an invitation to come to the United States to practice psychiatry, lecture to others in the medical profession and publish books about his findings.

His parents were excited for him. It was more than an honor. It would probably save their son’s life.

Frankl was concerned for the fate his Jewish parents might face under the Nazis.

He prayed for a sign from heaven. What was he to do?

One day he discovered a piece of marble lying on a table in their home. When he asked about it, his father told him he had found it among the ruins of a synagogue the Nazis had burned.

His father brought it home as it was part if a tablet listing the 10 Commandments, “Honor thy father and mother that their days be long upon the land.”

This was their son’s sign from Heaven. He knew he had to stay and do what he could to save his parents from whatever the Nazis planned to do to all the Jews in Austria. He turned down the invitation.

Frankl specialized in neurology and psychiatry, concentrating on depression and suicide. While still a medical student, he counseled high school students free of charge. As a result, not a single Viennese student committed suicide.

In Vienna, he was responsible for the “suicide pavilion” where he treated more than 3,000 women with suicidal tendencies.

When the Nazis took over Austria, he could no longer treat “Aryan” patients.

He headed the Rothschild Hospital neurological department, the only one in Vienna to which Jews were admitted. He made false diagnoses to save patients from Nazi euthanasia.

In 1942, Frankl, his wife and parents were deported to the Nazi ghetto in Czechoslovakia. The ghettos were a “model community” used to fool the Red Cross about slave labor and extermination camps where the Nazis murdered all Jews.

In 1944, Frankl, his wife Tilly and others were sent to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland. There 2,000 prisoners built a rail line to connect underground aircraft factories where the world’s first jet-powered bombers were made.

Doing this grueling work in sub-zero weather, many prisoners died from malnutrition or physical abuse.

Frankl was assaulted more than once, although he continued to work hard.

Weakened by a steady diet of thin soup, Frankl’s work ethic did not go unnoticed. He was sent to the so-called Türkheim rest camp. There he was allowed to treat 50 men with typhus.

His mother Elsa and brother Walter were murdered at Auschwitz. His wife Tilly was sent to Bergen-Belsen where Anne Frank was held and women were forced to do slave labor.

On April 27, 1945, Americans liberated the Türkheim camp. He and his sister Stella were their family’s only survivors of the Holocaust.

Frankl returned to Vienna, where “the flood gates opened” and he completed Man’s Search for Meaning in 1946. Frankl published 39 books translated into 49 languages. He taught seminars all over the world and received 29 honorary doctoral degrees. He died of heart failure in 1997 at age 92.

His book is written in easy to understand words although it’s subject matter is dark. Reading it is not for the faint of heart.

Frankl believed that we are driven by a need to find meaning in our lives – that it is this sense of meaning that enables us to overcome painful experiences. He wrote, “What is to give light must endure burning.”

After enduring the suffering in the Nazi camps, Frankl writes that even in those dehumanized conditions life has meaning. The one thing the Nazis could not take from him was his sense of himself and his attitude toward what life hands us, the good and the bad.

In the boundaries of the death camps, he found only two races of men – decent ones and unprincipled ones.

“Under such conditions, who could blame them? These were the men who were employed in the gas chambers and crematoriums and who knew very well that one day they would have to leave their enforced role of executioner and become victims themselves.”