Perhaps the most practical examples of coping with the oppression that comes with government sponsored directed-energy-weapons torture and community policing support through gang stalking, can be found in the Nazi concentration camps and Stasi prisons. I want to highlight the marked contrast in the lives of two victims. The first, Josef Kneifel, a political prisoner of the Stasi secret police in West Germany. The second, Viktor E. Frankl, a concentration camp inmate under the Nazi regime. The contrast in their responses to oppression and the resultant outcome gives insight into how we can best respond to long-term injustice.

Let’s first consider Josef Kneifel. Josef was arrested by the Stasi (the East German secret police) for his role in efforts to destabilize the oppressive regime in East Germany. As a particularly hated political prisoner, he was subject to torture, isolation, and a constant barrage of dehumanizing treatment. The Stasi also arrested his wife although she knew nothing of his crimes and tried to convince her to divorce him. She was offered immediate release if she did so, but she refused.

Kneifel suffered emotionally and physically while incarcerated. The book Stasi, by John O Koehler, describes Kneifel’s response during his imprisonment. Full of pent up anger against the regime, he looked for every opportunity to vent his feelings. He would think of ways to “mock the regime and prison officials. Using the jagged end of a broken plastic spoon, he cut veins in his legs and collected blood in a plastic cup.” With his own blood, he painted caricatures on the whitewashed cell walls, ridiculing Stasi warders and communism. He would draw blood and pour it into the lock of his cell door. When a warder opened his cell door, Kneifel sprayed him with blood he had collected in a metal bowl. His unrelenting anger contributed to the rapid decline of his health. When Kneifel was released, he was prescribed a regimen of kidney dialysis. His health ruined, he never recovered.

A profound contrast is found in the life of Viktor E. Frankl. Of Jewish heritage, he served as a psychiatrist in government clinics and hospitals in Vienna during the 1920-30’s. However, in 1942, along with his wife and parents, he was sentenced to hard labor in Theresienstadt concentration camp. “Though assigned to ordinary labor details until the last few weeks of the war, Frankl tried to cure fellow prisoners from despondency and prevent suicide.” Since it was forbidden to actively intervene in a suicide attempt, such activity had to be both preventative and clandestine. He secretly worked with inmates after long days spent in manual labor. His wife and parents died in the concentration camps. Frankl acknowledges that his spirituality and selfless efforts to help others protected his own mental health and allowed him to quickly adjust when released from the camp at the end of the war. In the post war years Frankl published more than 32 books including the highly regarded Man’s Search for Meaning. He served as a professor of neurology and psychiatry.

Here are two individuals who suffered great injustices at the hands of their governments. One gives in to bitterness and self-destructive anger, destroying his own health in the process. The other uses his limited resources to help fellow inmates at the risk of his own life. Both suffered great loss. Who made the better choice in responding to injustice? How did the choice each made affect their long-term mental and physical health?

These two examples provide a powerful encouragement for modern day victims of long-term injustice: Choose your attitude and response wisely! “We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” - Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl