The sense of such an affront is clearly conveyed by Victor Frankl’s recollections of his treatment in a Nazi concentration camp. In one incident, Frankl recalls, when he rested for a moment from his repair work on a railroad track, a guard threw a stone at him. As Frankl saw it, ‘That, to me, seemed the way to attract the attention of a beast, to call a domestic animal back to its job, a creature with which you have so little in common that you do not even punish it’ (1984:43). Treatment represents a particularly profound violation of human dignity. It is not simply a matter of treating someone badly (which might be the case if, in Frankl’s account, the guard had told Frankl to get back to work at once); it is treating a human being as though he or she were not human at all.