Comparing God On Trial And Man's Search For Meaning

The PBS film, God on Trial, was an excellent display of the Holocaust experience as a prisoner. It reveals the circumstances they lived in, their mind of thinking, and the ways they were treated as prisoners. Similar to Viktor E. Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning, the movie shows the prisoners searching for a reason for their punishment. They witnessed their family members in pain, their belongings being torn away from them, and their dignity slowly diminishing. For example, one of the prisoners was asked to choose one of his sons to live, while the others had to die. One who has not gone through the sacrifice of the Holocaust cannot fully understand the suffrage of being a prisoner. However, this movie allows the viewer to put into better …show more content…
Each prisoner shares their opinions about who to blame and why they are to be blamed. For example, one man stood up and claimed that if God was on the Jews side he would have made the whole world population Jewish. According to him, God was not on their side. Another man stated that their suffrage was due to the poor actions they had done to someone in their past, which is karma. The man that had to choose between his sons had a very different mentality from the rest of the group. He believed that God was still with him and that he was suffering with them. When first watching the trial, I was shocked at the way they were looking upon their future. However, as I got further into the movie it began to make more sense of why they were point fingers. The prisoners did this in order to survive mentally. They did not want to blame themselves because they would suffer even more. Through this experience, they needed to find hope in their struggle for life. It was interesting to compare and contrast this movie to Man’s Search for Meaning because the novel displayed the prisoners finding hope in God while the movie put the blame in