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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What were the exceptions to the "cultural hibernation" in camp?
(a) Politics and religion.
(b) Religion and writing.
(c) Writing and music.
(d) Art and music.

2. How did prisoners experience beauty?
(a) They discussed beautiful art that they had seen outside the camp.
(b) Their lives were too focused on primitive needs to worry about such things.
(c) They experienced it intensely.
(d) The SS officers made light of their lack of sensibility when surrounded by beauty in nature.

3. What is the principal question that the author tries to address?
(a) "Why did the atrocities in the concentration camps go on for so long?"
(b) "How was everyday life in a prison camp reflected in the mind of the average person?"
(c) "What early childhood trauma may have prompted Hitler to his terrible ideas?"
(d) "Why did so many people follow such an extreme leader?"

4. What happens in the story of Death in Teheran?
(a) Death threatens a servant who flees to Teheran, but Teheran is where Death plans to meet him.
(b) A man dies in Teheran, but faces his death bravely, and this inspires the theory of logotherapy.
(c) It is the story of a tragic death by fire in Teheran, which shows that all of us must die in the end.
(d) It is a story of a man who dies in Teheran, because of his own cruelty to his neighbors.

5. What does Frankl argue happened in camp to "sensitive people used to a rich intellectual life"?
(a) The damage to their inner life was less.
(b) They were beaten more harshly.
(c) They fell ill more frequently.
(d) They had difficulty adapting to not being heard.

6. What does the author claim hurts most about the physical blows from SS officers?
(a) The use of sticks to hit the prisoners.
(b) The unfairness of the blows.
(c) The way in which the SS officers did not speak to the prisoners before beating them.
(d) The way that the officers hit prisoners where they were already injured.

7. What does Frankl call "the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire."
(a) Belonging.
(b) Hope.
(c) Love.
(d) Faith.

8. What does Frankl believe explains the lack of sexual urge in the concentration camp?
(a) Fear.
(b) Undernourishment.
(c) Shock.
(d) Stress.

9. Where does the author of the book travel in a "prison car" with small peepholes?
(a) Past his hometown.
(b) To Switzerland.
(c) To Auschwitz.
(d) Through Germany.

10. Who is this book most concerned with?
(a) The Capos -- "prisoners who acted as trustees, having special privileges."
(b) Hitler himself.
(c) The "great army of unknown and unrecorded victims."
(d) The Nazi leadership, and the way in which they made decisions regarding the fate of the concentration camps.

11. How many mental phases does the author claim that concentration camp prisoners go through?
(a) Two separate phases.
(b) Four phases.
(c) Ten distinct phases.
(d) Three distinct phases.

12. When was there a free fight among the prisoners?
(a) Before meal time, when prisoners competed for one of the limited number of two-course meals.
(b) Before bed, when men and women competed for a place on a soft bed.
(c) Before work began daily, when prisoners competed to be assigned the first jobs, as these were the least physically demanding.
(d) Before there was a shipment of the feeble and inable to work, when prisoners struggled not to be transported to another site.

13. How does Frankl describe the "size" of human suffering?
(a) It is relative.
(b) It can never be as great as it was for prisoners in Auschwitz.
(c) It is impossible to gauge.
(d) It is only perceptible to the individual.

14. Under what conditions does Frankl describe the SS beating prisoners?
(a) When they spoke before being spoken to.
(b) At the direction of the SS authorities, prisoners were beaten.
(c) At the slightest provocation or for no reason at all.
(d) When they were injurred and unable to work.

15. Frankl was sent to another camp after his stay in Auschwitz. Why were the prisoners there pleased?
(a) There were no gas chambers.
(b) The food was good.
(c) The SS was not as cruel.
(d) There was no snow.

Short Answer Questions

1. What did prisoners often discuss when they had a free moment?

2. Why does the author, himself a concentration camp survivor, write, "We know: the best of us did not return"?

3. Who narrates this story?

4. What symptom characterizes the first mental phase of prisoners in concentration camps?

5. Why were dead men thrown on trains transporting prisoners to different concentration camps?

(see the answer keys)

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