Viktor Frankl

A Viennese psychiatrist who had already begun developing his ideas when he was deported, and who lost his wife, his mother and his father in the camps. Man's Search for Meaning was written in nine days after the war ended.

The first half is his account of Auschwitz and Dachau observed as a clinician: who endured, who stopped trying, and what appeared to separate them. The second half lays out logotherapy, built on the claim that the primary human drive is toward meaning, and that meaning stays available when nothing else does.

He was careful never to say suffering is good, only that the response to it can be chosen. That distinction disappears in most of the quotations attributed to him.