The Cap, or The Price of a Life

Frister, Roman

ISBN 10: 0753810964 / ISBN 13: 9780753810965

Published by Phoenix (an Imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd ), 2000

The book has been read but remains in clean condition. All pages are intact and the cover is intact. Some minor wear to the spine. Seller Inventory # GOR001820351

Synopsis:

WW2, trade 1st edition 1st printing paperback, new, Concentration camp In stock shipped from our UK warehouse

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

Bibliographic Details

Title: The Cap, or The Price of a Life
Publisher: Phoenix (an Imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd )
Publication Date: 2000
Binding: Paperback
Condition: Good