The Cap: The Price of a Life

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Open Road + Grove/Atlantic, 2007 M12 1 - 384 páginas
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

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Página 117 - There be three things which are too wonderful for me, yea, four which I know not: The way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way of a man with a maid.
Página 358 - I congratulate you! Roosevelt is dead. It is written in the stars that the second half of April will be the turning point for us.
Página 209 - There was a long silence at the other end of the line, and then Maria spoke up. "Anita," she said, "what would we ever do without you?
Página 273 - What has happened will happen again, and what has been done will be done again ; there is nothing new under the sun. 10Is there anything of which it can be said, 'Look, this is new' ? No, it was already in existence, long before our time.
Página 21 - Everything seemed as eternal as the earth's orbit around the sun. Even as the clouds were darkening over Europe and thunder rumbled on the horizon, we went on seeing starry skies. If there was anyone who read the writing on the wall, it was not my parents.
Página 16 - As far back as I can remember it was taken for granted I should get my degree and go into the civil service.
Página 157 - It's not for us and he who has it doesn't know what to do with it. I know what to do with it.
Página 95 - Kruczek took off his coat, hung it on the back of the chair, and sat with his legs straight in front of him. "I'm bushed.
Página 88 - What are you doing here?" "I have to talk to you.
Página 55 - For the first time I noticed that she was no longer a high school girl but a sexually provocative young woman.

Acerca del autor (2007)

Roman Frister is a journalist living in Israel. He was editor and a reporter on the Israeli daily newspaper Ha'aretz and now runs the School of Journalism in Tel Aviv.

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