The reader may ask me why I did not try to escape what was in store for me after Hitler had occupied Austria. Let me answer the question by recalling the following story.
Shortly before the United States entered WWII, I received an invitation to come to the American consulate in Vienna to pick up my immigration Visa.
My old parents were overjoyed because they’re expected that I would soon be allowed to leave Austria. I suddenly hesitated, however. The question beset me: Could I really afford to leave my parents alone to face their fate, to be sent, sooner or later, into a concentration camp, or even to a so-called extermination camp?
Where did my responsibility lie?
Should I foster my brainchild, logotherapy, by emigrating to fertile soil where I could write my books? Or should I concentrate on my duties as a real child, the child of my parents, who had to do whatever he could to protect them?
I pondered the problem this way and that but could not arrive at a solution; this was the type of dilemma that had made one wish for a “hint from heaven,” as the phrase goes.
It was then that I noticed a piece of marble lying on the table at home. When I asked my father about it, he explained that he had found it on the site where the National Socialists have burned down the largest Viennese synagogue. He had taken the piece home because it was a part of the tablets on which the 10 commandments were inscribed.
One gilded Hebrew letter was engraved on the piece; my father explained that this letter stood for one of the 10 commandments.
Eagerly I asked, “which one is it?”
He answered, “Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long upon the land.”
At that moment I decided to stay with my father and my mother upon the land and to let the American Visa lapse. (Page xv-xvi, Man’s Search For Meaning, by V Frankl)