One in the same, but different?

These two works have many things in common. They chronicle two men, taken captive during WWII. Both suffer horrendous treatment from their captors. Both men loose their identity and possibly most shocking, both these stories are true.

However I am not in third grade, and this is not a book report. What I hope to delve into is the conclusions of both of these tales. Because one describes the horrors of a Jew in a German concentration camp and the other the brutality suffered by a Scottish officer in a Japanese POW camp, building the "Rail of Death" but both end on very different notes.

In "To End All Wars" Ernest Gordon tells his story of being captured and tortured by the Japanese military, and being forced to work while his brothers in arms died around him. Surviving on little more than rice and hope, Gordon has a spiritual revelation through a friend and begins to see the change in his fellow captives. It is hope in themselves and God that saves them from the brink of destruction and allows them to carry on. Gordon credits his spiritual conversion with his survival, and his eventual freedom. For Gordon, Jesus is found through his suffering, and is also credited with his road to redemption.

Similarly in "Man's Search For Meaning" Viktor Frankl is imprisoned in a Nazi death camp where he is starved, worked and beaten to the edge of death. Frankl is forced to deal with his own mortality as those around him are systematically exterminated simply for their being of Jewish decent. Upon being liberated, Frankl sees the disullionsment that permeates the world, and the potential of man to create complete despair and suffering in his fellow man. Thus the hope that defined Gordon's experience Frankl sees as just something to get the prisoner through, a coping mechanism. For Frankl man's search for meaning ends when he realizes that hope is nothing more than that, a hope...never realized.

Both of these men start at similar points but end at very different ones. Gordon sees death and sees hopelessness but comes to find that from that or maybe within that there is actually hope, that is where he feels God resides. Frankl though looks into the same eyes of death, and come out knowing that the hope that others had, was nothing more, nothing was realized and the death and suffering still remain. For Frankl he never really left the concentration camp, though he did, because the memories and the basis of their sheer existence still remain. Whether Gordon found solace in God or religion the fact still remains that man outside of God is able to perpetrate some true evil.

This brings me to one of my points, whether or not god is their, evil happens and if that is the case than isn't it also true that whether or not god is there good happens as well. In the Christian tradition it is easy to say God is there in the good, but a little harder to say he is there in the evil as well. Is it not possible that a being created by god with the capacity to do evil might be just doing God's will? Can't it be assumed that if the Christian God is good that perhaps the opposite is true as well? Evil here is the main point. If the catalyst for evil is not God, but man, than isn't it safe to say that hope in the face of evil is the product of man as well?

Often times people want to attribute the bad or evil in the world to mans free will, which is fair, but in doing this you also have to conclude that the good must be his own free will as well, then where exactly does God fit in? For Frankl He didn't, and that is why Frankl saw the anger, hope, pain and love as all products of the human condition; products of this idea that man is this elevated animal because of his ability to reason, and kill, and love...

So why wouldn't we bring this up at the dinner table? Because it invokes the idea that man is 100% in control of his own destiny, it is in no ones hands but his own. Therefore the time we are given is all that we have, use it wisely.