How Did They All Overcome?

When Richard Wurmbrand was in communist prison,
when Victor Frankl was in a second world war
concentration camp, they found something to dance
about, a way to escape reality through the imagination,
writing books about it afterwards, hang on to integrity,
not hating the world or humanity, not plotting to blow
up themselves to escape the pain of awareness of
existence, when Herman Charles Bosman wrote a
Cold Stone Jug and created Oom Schalk Lourens,
when Spike Milligan, suffering from depression, wrote
the funny Woodcutter’s Song, when Giovanni Guareschi
wrote Don Camillo And The Devil, when J. van Melle
wrote his sad short stories of a shepherd with yellow
teeth, when C. M. van den Heever wrote Winds in
Circles, when Langenhoven wrote The Christmas
Kids, when Paul Gallico wrote Love of Seven Dolls,
when Emily Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights…

...how did they all overcome the circumstances in
their world and the feelings in their heart and head
to create something enduring - that took them
beyond the borders of immediate depression
and death?