The Cap: The Price of a Life is Roman Frister’s autobiography, written in a nonlinear fashion of his survival through horrendous situations throughout concentration camps and hate during the Holocaust.
I don’t know about other Holocaust survivor autobiographies, but Frister has somehow found a method of lightening the load of this heavy story while also expanding the poignancy to greater heights.
For a book about one man, these pages contain what seem like multiple lifetimes, with stories about his family, family history, and numerous marriages and children. Each seemingly more fascinating than the next.
Harrowing as his experience is, because he doesn’t reveal his story linearly, you still feel the horror as it comes through more than a few times. It is balanced, however, by the life of a vibrant and well-traveled person, not just a survivor and their against-all-odds struggle.
Perhaps this is what makes this book so incredible. It isn’t just a survival story. There is more here about life than there is about struggle.
Frister’s philosophy, intellect, and humanity are all paramount in his telling the stories of his family, his relationships, and his experiences both as a captive and a survivor.
In fact, because of the way this book is constructed, one of the more relevant lessons he passes on is related to his “resolve to give up the search for the past. Each time I found a piece of it, the result was disappointment and bafflement. The road leading to the places that had meant so much to me took me back not to my youth but to an empty theater I did not wish to visit. The actors had changed. The drama was over.”
This is something that people who spend too much time online, specifically Facebook with its automated “memories,” would do well to understand. If you are always living in, surrounded by, or searching for the past, how can you appreciate and fully embrace the present?
Furthermore, his philosophy on experience is well stated:
“As I grew older I began to understand that the self is formed by the layering of experience. Generally, we are no more aware of this process than the earth is aware of the plants and weeds taking root in it. There is something mysterious about the recombination or reappearance, unmonitored by consciousness, of long-forgotten memories. Each is an element in the periodic table that composes us. Each is compounded with all the other people, places, things, events, moods, smells, harmonies, discords, yieldings, resistings that we are made of.”
Is this book for everyone? It feels like it should be. Not because everyone should read a survivor’s story, but because most people have only read passages from The Diary of Anne Frank or have watched Spielberg’s masterpiece in Schindler’s List. This, while overlapping historically, is more vastly vivid and even more personal. Perhaps that’s just Frister’s writing style, or perhaps it’s just that his extremely well-lived life shows that survivors can be more than their survival.
Read the Secret File of technical information and quotes from The Cap: The Price of a Life.