Rachel and Jon Goldberg-Polin: ‘ Grief is a Badge of Love’

Anderson Cooper· Host0:01

Welcome to All There Is. Years ago, I read a book called Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, and it's become a, a really important book for me. It's about his experience in Nazi concentration camps. It's really a book about survival. Frankl wrote, "Most men in a concentration camp believe that the real opportunities of life had passed. Yet, in reality, there was an opportunity and a challenge. One can make a victory of those experiences, turning life into an inner triumph, or one could ignore the challenge and simply vegetate." Frankl said that any attempt to restore a man's inner strength in the camp had first to succeed in showing him some future goal. He quoted Friedrich Nietzsche's words, "He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how." "Whenever there was an opportunity for it," Frankl wrote, "one had to give them a why, an aim for their lives, in order to strengthen them to bear the terrible how of their existence. We had to learn," he says, "ourselves, and furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us." Now, that book, written in 1946, has helped me and millions of people. It also helped a 23-year-old man named Hersh Goldberg-Polin when he was maimed and taken hostage by Hamas on October 7th. Hersh was executed 328 days later, but his mom, Rachel, now carries that book, Man's Search for Meaning, wherever she goes. She's written a book now about