The Cap: The Price of a Life

An unsentimental, frank confession by a Holocaust survivor whose instinct for survival transcended all moral restraint looks at life in the camps with unsparing candor. 35,000 first printing.

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.

Fristers Holocaust memoir, which stirred up controversy in Israel and gained an international cult following, is finally coming out in the US. Though he weighed under 85 pounds, suffered from tuberculosis, partial deafness, dystrophia alimentaria (the starvation syndrome), and intestinal problems, Frister survived the Nazi death-camps. Indeed, his testimony is imbued with an unshakable will to survive, since in the camps, he was faced with decisions most of us only make when were playing Scruples with friends. Once his father came down with typhoid fever, Frister waited eagerly for him to die, since hidden under his infirmary cot were a few bites of bread. After being liberated, Frister had the opportunity to kill a Nazibut when a Soviet handed Frister a knife and urged him to make him bleed, Frister declined: Free to go where I wanted, I had no strength to stand up. I could kill a Naziand saw no point in it. The Nazis put a Jew called Wilczek in charge of a cadre of Jewish prisoners; for his loyal service, Wilczek got better treatment and a little extra food. On the train to Auschwitz, Frister looked on as several of his fellow prisoner choked Wilczeks son to death. Then Frister took Wilczek Jr.s buttery-soft leather boots from his corpse. But the central moral conundrum here is not the right way to mourn your fathers passing or the appropriate response to the lynching of Judas Iscariots son: It is what to do when you have two choicesdie, or put someone else in harms way. For those who marveled at Life is Beautiful, read The Reader, stood in the long queues at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, and still cant get enough of the Holocaust, Fristers gut-wrenching memoir is a must read. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

At 16, Frister watched an SS officer kill his mother. Later, amid horrible suffering in the camps, he did his best to survive neglect, sexual abuse, and starvation. Here, Holocaust survivor Frister honestly explains how such experiences can cause a person to act immorally to save his life. As he lay dying of typhoid in the camp infirmary, his father urged him to be a "decent man," but Frister acknowledges that he eagerly awaited his father's death, hungry for the bread hidden beneath the cot. In another instance, he stole someone else's cap when his was stolen, for anyone in a concentration camp without a cap was killed. After the war, Frister became a journalist in Poland until his emigration to Israel in 1957, where he was an editor and reporter for Ha'aretz, the leading Israeli daily paper. This book alternates between his life in the camps and life in Israel to show how Frister's early experiences made him what he is. Especially interesting is the way Frister was treated when he got out of the camp by his rescuers, family, doctors, friends, etc. This book is unique in showing one man's choosing survival over moral behavior. Recommended for all Holocaust collections.
---Mary F. Salony, West Virginia Northern Community Coll. Lib., Wheeling
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.