Third Phase: After Liberation

The gates open, the prisoners walk out, and nothing inside them moves. He describes wandering into flowering meadows with comrades, registering the fact of freedom without the feeling of it — they had, he says, lost the ability to feel pleased and had to relearn it slowly. Psychologists call it depersonalization; Frankl renders it as life become a dream one dares not believe.

The body recovers first and crudely: released men ate ravenously for days. The mind's recovery was slower and morally more dangerous. Frankl identifies two specific corruptions waiting on the far side of the wire. The first is bitterness — the returning prisoner who meets shrugging neighbors ('we didn't know', 'we suffered too') and feels his years of suffering cheapened. The second is disillusionment — coming home to find the person for whom one had stayed alive is dead, the city destroyed, the longed-for moment permanently missing its witness.

Most striking is his honesty about what liberation did to some of the liberated: men who had been objects of arbitrary force now felt entitled to wield it, trampling a farmer's young crops and snapping that their suffering justified it. Frankl records correcting a comrade in exactly that field, and states the principle flatly — no one has the right to do wrong, even if wrong has been done to them. Suffering confers no moral license.

The phase completes the book's arc: survival is not the finish line. The last task of the survivor is to refuse both self-pity and revenge, and Frankl notes what finally steadied such men — the day they could look back and comprehend that after all they had suffered, there was nothing left they need fear, except their own conscience.

Frankl's clinical label for the healing timeline matters: the deformation was not permanent. With time, patience, and truthful conversation, the released prisoner's warped moral reflexes straightened — but only if someone refused to flatter the bitterness. His insistence that even victims must be held to the ordinary moral law was, and remains, the chapter's most demanding sentence.