An impromptu visit to a Nazi concentration camp has provided an unlikely source of hope for Australia’s Olympians during the COVID pandemic.
Finding the light to keep going when everything else seems lost can sometimes mean going to the darkest of places.
For Australia’s Olympic Rugby Sevens players, one of the beacons that is helping them make sense of all the uncertainty caused by the global pandemic has its roots in an impromptu visit to a notorious Nazi concentration camp.
It was in late 2019, just months before the world went into lockdown, when the national men’s team were playing a warm-up tournament in Munich after failing to automatically qualify for the Tokyo Olympics, that Tim Walsh decided to take his players to Dachau, the location of Adolf Hitler’s first death camp.
At least 32,000 prisoners were killed at Dachau, but it wasn’t the horror of the genocide that the team’s head coach most wanted to impress upon his squad; instead it was the messages of hope from Holocaust survivors.
So before they left, he bought each of his players a copy of Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl’s bestseller about his own experiences as a prisoner at Auschwitz.
A celebrated psychiatrist, Frankl developed the theory that individuals are able to find ways of dealing with any manner of hardship and suffering because the one thing that can never be taken away is the freedom to choose attitude.
Read the article by Julian Linden in The Daily Telegraph.