Viktor E. Frankl and his 1945 dictation

These pages contain a special edition, annotated and commented on, of the manuscript dictated over nine days and nights by Viktor Emil Frankl before Christmas 1945, in the Viennese winter. The book was published anonymously on the cover in 1946, but with the author’s name on the first page. The fruitful forty years of work on the translated text of the first German edition (Ein Psycholog erlebt das Konzentrationslager – A Psychologist in the Concentration Camp, by PF and Dr. A. Von Ritter-Záhony, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1955), have allowed Guillermo Pareja Herrera to delve substantially into the richness of the communications and personal contacts he maintained with Viktor Frankl. “I hope that this reading will be a fortunate one for everyone. His experience is perennial as a call for us not to forget what human beings are capable of doing, both in the depths of dehumanization symbolized in Auschwitz, Hiroshima or Guantanamo, in genocides or dictatorships; as well as in the heights of kindness and heroism of millions of anonymous beings. We are what we decide to be. The present and future of our one and only human family depend on us, and this painful past is the opportunity to return to the reunion with our lost humanity that slowly advances in its rehumanization,” says the author.

GUILLERMO PAREJA HERRE

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