The Cap
Author: Roman Frister
Release: March 1, 2000
Tagline: The Price of a Life
Publisher: Grove Pr
Genre: History, Biography, Memoir, WW2
ISBN-10: 0802116590
ISBN-13: 978-0802116598
Declassified by Agent Palmer: The Cap is more about life than it is about survival
Quotes and Lines
Since the start of the war I had wrapped myself in a thick layer of callousness. It was suicidal not to detach yourself from the human suffering around you. The path to freedom from self-destructive qualms ran over the corpses of those nobler than you.
“Your intellect has grown up too fast.” Fredek’s father replied.
“The child in you has been killed without your noticing.”
“My father says it’s best to forget the past.”
“Those are just words. Replacing the pages of the Bible with Darwin doesn’t change how the world was created.”
People believed what suited them. War, like natural disasters, had no place in my mother’s thinking. The world she had constructed around her was eternal.
The sight of Czesia’s pale face in her coffin made me 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.
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 weeks 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.
Freedom can mean different things. A lion in the green space of a progressive zoo feels freer than a lion in a cage. But how much freer does a hungry alley cat feel than a well-fed house pet? Does more freedom always mean more happiness? Where is the line between necessary limits and chains?
Sharing a common fate did not create a common bond. There had to be obligations and compromises as well. If none of us reached out for a helping hand to each other in the whirlpool that was dragging us all down, this was because the load of survival was insufficient to go around. In the absence of a savior to miraculously feed all the hungry, everyone hoarded every crumb he could.