The Cap
The Price of a Life
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4.2 • 14 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A Polish survivor’s “brutal and beautifully written” Holocaust memoir. “The power of his portrayal of one man’s instinct for survival . . . cannot be denied” (The Boston Globe).
The Cap is an unconventional Holocaust memoir that defies all moral judgment and ventures into a soul blackened by the unforgiving cruelty of its surroundings. Roman Frister’s memoir of his life before, during, and after his imprisonment in the Nazi concentration camps sparked enormous controversy and became an international bestseller. With bone-chilling candor, Frister illustrates how the impulse to live unhinges our comfortable notions of morality, blurring the boundary between victim and oppressor and leaving absolutely no room for martyrdom.
By the time Roman Frister was sixteen, he had watched his mother murdered by an SS officer and he had waited for his father to expire, eager to retrieve a hidden half loaf of bread from beneath the dying man’s cot. When confronted with certain death, he placed another inmate in harm’s way to save himself. Frister’s resilience and instinct for self-preservation—developed in the camps—become the source of his life’s successes and failures. Chilling and unsentimental, The Cap is a rare and unadorned self-portrait of a man willing to show all of his scars. Reflected in stark relief are the indelible wounds of all twentieth-century European Jews. An exceptional and groundbreaking testimony, Roman Frister’s “gut-wrenching memoir is a must-read” (Kirkus Reviews).
“Staggering in its honesty . . . Frister’s courage to plumb the ambiguity of his actions . . . leaves the reader awestruck.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Staggering in its honesty, Frister's memoir of his life in Poland as it was shaped by WWII has been deservedly praised in the international press. The book, ably translated from Hebrew, sparked controversy in Israel for its bleak assessment of the moral ambiguity of some Jews' responses to the oppression of the Holocaust. Frister's shocking opening image evokes how the camps dehumanized the prisoners: "no one thought of tomorrow. We lived by the minute, the secret of our modest happiness being the ability to plod like cattle around our pen, oblivious of the slaughterhouse." The author, a prominent journalist who emigrated to Israel in 1957 when in his late 20s, jarringly plunges into what he views as the war's complete moral vacuum. In his experience, captor and captive alike were stripped of their humanity by the constant presence of death. Survival was the only imperative, and countless passages of his book are so shocking they are nearly beyond belief. At the Plaszow concentration camp, he looks on as notorious Gestapo officer Wilhelm Kunde crushes Frister's mother's skull with a pistol butt. Watching his louse-ridden father die at a work camp infirmary, he can only long hungrily for the half-loaf of bread hidden under the man's straw mattress. The precise depiction and abundance of detail yield a taut and compulsively readable narrative that makes fresh again horrors that have become familiar. In the end, Frister's courage to plumb the ambiguity of his actions--which include coldly trading another prisoner's life for his own and, many years later, abandoning several of his children--leaves the reader awestruck.
