Roman Frister

The Cap

The Price of a Life

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

'I have invented nothing. Reality turns out to be more fascinating and yet also more terrible than any product of the imagination.' In an old cardboard suitcase found in a flea market in Jaffa, Roman Frister discovered the scraps of paper that were to form the basis of this remarkable history. Using everything from upholsterers' bills to personal letters, he reconstructs the story of the Levy family, who struggled to become one of the richest and most respected Jewish families in Pomerania, Prussia, but whose fortunes were to turn to dust in Nazi Germany. The story of the Levy family reads like an epic novel, but the events that shaped their lives were all too real for the generations of Jews who made a home in Prussia, then Germany. Yet as the power of the German Reich grew, so did the impossible tensions between the love of their homeland and their Jewish identity.

Roman Frister

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