This pattern, of affirmation to life, which would also dominate the Meaning of Life, is already visible in the lectures given in March and April of 1946, even before the manuscripts that would become his widely read book were published.

Personally, the pattern "Yes to life" touches me deeply. The parents of my parents came to the United States around 1900, trying to escape the hatred and violence that – in a much more extreme form, certainly – Frankl and other Holocaust survivors experienced. Also, Frankl’s first lecture was given in March 1946, around the time I was born, to parents determined to defy all kinds of threats and fears that had dominated the world in the preceding years; parents who, in their own way, said "Yes to life."

Today, almost seventy-five years later, what had formed the basis for Frankl’s lectures is – fortunately – a distant memory. We, the children of the early postwar years, may have had at least a vague sense of the darkness of the Nazi extermination camps, but even today, very few young people are aware of the Holocaust itself.

Nevertheless, even if this is the case, Frankl’s words, in the aftermath of his recent trials, still hold their value today. Identifying a "great lie" was one of the assignments we were asked to prepare for class at the high school I attended in California. Every well-organized propaganda campaign needs a "great lie." In the case of the Nazis, one of their propaganda’s "great lies" was the superiority of the so-called Aryan race, which, as a "master race," was destined to dominate the planet.