The Cap: The Price of a Life [Hardcover]

Roman Frister (Author), Hillel Halkin (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 2000

Uncompromisingly frank, "both brutal and beautifully written" (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 best-seller. 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).

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"The path to freedom from self-destructive qualms ran over the corpses of those nobler than you," Roman Frister writes in his bone-chilling autobiography. Moving between his childhood in Silesia, adolescence in Nazi concentration camps, postwar career as a journalist in Communist Poland and later in Israel (to which he emigrated in 1957), Frister's nonchronological narrative is carefully structured to slowly reveal the Holocaust's devastating impact on an individual life. Young Roman watches a German officer kill his mother with a single blow, then is forced to lie on her cooling corpse; at 15, he sits by his dying father's bed, thinking only of the half-loaf of bread underneath it: "I was afraid it might crumble before he stopped breathing." Frister does nothing to soften such horrific experiences, nor does he share his emotions. Yet readers will sense the author is not unfeeling, but rather in a state of profound moral shock that endures to scar his adult existence. The "thick layer of callousness" he wrapped around himself in the camps may seem to enfold him still, but it's peeled away by his ferocious passion for truth, however unsavory. As a colleague tells Frister after reading his account of saving his own life by stealing the cap of a fellow prisoner (who was shot), "You've demonstrated what honesty means." --Wendy Smith

From 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. (Feb.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Grove Pr; First Edition Stated edition (February 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802116590
• ISBN-13: 978-0802116598
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,835,766 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Detailed and Generally Balanced Holocaust Survivor Testimony, January 11, 2008

By 

Jan Peczkis "Scholar and Thinker" (Chicago IL, USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Cap: The Price of a Life (Hardcover)

I will skip the personal details discussed by other reviewers, and focus on matters of historical significance. With one obvious exception, Frister shows an excellent grasp of factual events. He makes the unbelievable statement that the NSZ "did not kill Germans at all" (p. 263), only killed Jews, and then repeats the Communist-propaganda canard that the Brygada Swietokrzyska (Holy Cross Brigade) had fought on the German side.

Even as late as 1941, Frister's mother didn't believe that the invading Germans intended to harm the Jews (p. 180). This adds to similar testimonies, and undercuts the argument that the massive Jewish-Soviet collaboration had been motivated by a desire to be protected from the Nazis.

Unlike those who, from their safe perches, moralize to Poles about their need to have been more willing to risk their lives on behalf of Jews, Frister does not: "And what right did I have to condemn them? Why should they risk themselves and their families for a Jewish boy they didn't know? Would I have behaved any differently? I knew the answer to that, too. I wouldn't have lifted a finger. Everyone was equally intimidated." (p. 192)

Frister writes: "Jozef Kruczek had prepared a perfect hideout for us. Beneath a bale of hay tossed with deliberate carelessness on the floor of the barn was a hidden trapdoor that descended to a cellar as big as a cottage. Before we came this had served as an abattoir. The screeching of the slaughtered pigs remained within its walls--a big help in avoiding German confiscations and getting the meat to the black market." (p. 97). Ironic to Polonophobes (e. g., Jan T. Gross), who accuse Poles of being willing to incur the German-imposed death penalty by illegally slaughtering animals, but seldom by hiding Jews, we see the same Polish secretiveness in both activities! (Besides, slaughtering an animal was a quick one-time act. Hiding a Jew was a continuous risk.)

Unlike most Holocaust materials, Frister's work presents a balanced view of Polish and Jewish misdeeds. He mentions Poles looting Jews (p. 120) as well as regular Pole-on-Pole thievery (p. 100). The Judenrat, besides collaborating with the Germans in the roundups of Jews to their deaths (e. g., p. 92, 105, 120), also stole from poor Jews (p. 120). Jewish informers played an instrumental role in the uncovering of hidden Jews (e. g., p. 105, 112, 120, 190-191). Twice Frister escaped death despite being denounced to the Germans by Jewish informers (p. 112, 190-191), the latter of whom he found to be very clever and diligent in their undercover work. How many other fugitive Jews were betrayed, not by ethnic Poles as automatically assumed, but by Jewish Gestapo agents and informers?

We were told, in the wake of the Auschwitz Carmelite convent controversy, that Jews find Christian symbols offensive because they remind them of past persecutions by Christians. Frister mentions a Jew, Henryk Leiderman, who had no problem with rosaries when it came to selling them to Polish peasants (p. 36).

Frister spent some years in postwar Poland before emigrating to Israel. He is candid about the fact that he, and other Jews, got privileged positions in the Soviet-imposed Communist regime (p. 34, 169).

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars brilliant holocaust memoir, March 24, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Cap: The Price of a Life (Hardcover)

Roman Frister has written a haunting memoir of his life before, during, and after the holocaust. It is a gripping story, not particularly of courage but of raw survival. Frister is not your usual hero. He just wants to live through the concentration camps. Frister's most shameful memory is stealing the cap of a sleeping prisoner after his own was stolen, condemming him to death the next day because anyone reporting to roll call without a cap was shot. Frister has no real remorse. Survival was all that mattered. He even matter of factly describes his father's death from cholera in terms of wanting his bread ration more than hoping his father dragged out his death.Frister's decriptions of camp life are vivid and chilling. he was forced to watch his mother brutally murdered by an SS officer.This is a must read for anyone who wants to explore in human terms the death camps and the follow-up treatment of its survivors. The writing flows beautifully and is impossible to put down.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Pick this book up!, March 23, 2000

By 

CF (Chicago) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Cap: The Price of a Life (Hardcover)

I've read lots of Holocaust memoirs, and this one truly stands out. I picked this book up at a Barnes and Noble just before going to the SF airport, and I couldn't put it down. You can just feel the author's honesty when reading this. He doesn't hide anything, not even about himself. He brings up several issues not always not always found in other memoirs. There are several different plots going on, so you'll want to continue reading in order to keep up with them all.