By the time Roman Frister was sixteen years old, he had watched an enraged S.S. officer crush his mother's skull and had felt her body grow cold beneath him. He had waited with unmasked eagerness for his father to expire in a camp infirmary, aware that there was a half loaf of bread hidden beneath the dying man's lice-infested cot. When confronted with certain death, he had knowingly placed another inmate in harm's way in the interest of sparing his own life, and never looked back. Frister's resilience and his unequivocal instinct for self-preservation became the source of all his successes and failures throughout his life. Chilling and unsentimental, The Cap is that rare and unadorned self-portrait of a man not content to look at himself in only a flattering light, a man willing to bring all his scars into full view. And reflected in stark relief are the indelible wounds of all twentieth-century European Jews, as well as the rubble of the most brutal epoch in recent memory, from which the Jewish homeland was cobbled under the flag of Zionism. An exceptional and groundbreaking testimony, The Cap is already an international sensation and is destined to be a classic.