The Cap or the Price of a Life
Roman Frister, tr Hillel Halkin
Weidenfeld, £18.99, pp385
Buy it at BOL

'Pity in war is like syphilis in love - it ruins everything.' The war was over when Roman Frister heard those words, from his father-in-law, but he had already learnt part of their truth in labour and concentration camps. In the incident which gives his memoir its title, he had taken another prisoner's cap to replace his own, knowing that anyone bare-headed at roll-call would be shot.

The absence of his own cap was not a matter of carelessness. A paedophile called Arpad Basci had raped him, and then sneaked away the vital piece of uniform. Basci had special privileges (he sculpted chess pieces that the guards coveted) but his tastes wouldn't go unpunished if his victims talked. Taking their caps was his insurance policy.

Frister was brought up in the Southern Silesian town of Bielsko-Biala, a centre of the textile industry where Polish and German influences uneasily mixed. Father was a lawyer, an autocrat who closed down the only potentially intimate conversation they had before the war with the pronouncement, 'You're old enough to master your feelings' (Roman was around 10 at the time). Mother had pretensions, and tried to ban business discussions from the dinner-table, hoping that she would in this way create a salon. When at about the same age he read his parents' love letters, he could detect no similarities between these passionate people and the couple he lived with.

Fister's account of them, and of himself, is unsparing. While his father was dying of typhus in an 'infirmary' in which no doctor had ever set foot, Roman was concerned as much as anything with the half-loaf of bread hidden in his mattress. He refers to his mother's courage, but also records that in October 1938, when Jewish deportees with Polish citizenship were being repatriated, her interest in them was not altruistic. Hearing that some were reduced to selling their jewellery, she proposed a trip to the border in hopes of a bargain.

'Price' may be the word in the subtitle, but the book's real preoccupation is with value, in a world of grotesque bargains. After the war Frister even managed to sell the tuberculosis he had contracted in the camps, having X-rays taken under an assumed name so a healthy man could be exempted from military service.

The unforgettable images, inevitably, are from the camp. The material of Basci's sculpture was bread: he had starving young inmates chew it to the right consistency, and they were only allowed to swallow a crust when they had produced an adequate supply. When Basci was assaulting Frister, he also pushed bread in his mouth, to guarantee silence. That mouthful as he had planned it, was to be the boy's last meal.

Yet in its construction and tone, The Cap breaks with the tradition of the Holocaust memoir. Frister is an experienced writer, and has chosen to alternate the wartime passages with earlier and later memories. The effect is to dethrone those terrible years, to make them something less than the uncaused cause of everything that was ever wrong with a survivor's life.

What is left out is the dominant strain in Holocaust literature: the sense of witness. Frister can only speak from his experience, not speak for anyone else. When he says that he is glad that the Holocaust shaped him more than his father did, this can seem like a shocking statement, in view of the millions who didn't survive. But for Frister, his survival was a matter of sheer luck, of holding the winning lottery ticket - and luck imposes no responsibilities. Before the war, he had never so much as seen an orthodox Jew.

Does treating the Holocaust as the central event of Jewish history grant Hitler a perverse sort of victory? If so, then Frister's autobiography opposes that tendency, by treating the Holocaust as only part of his life. The child in him had been killed without his noticing, but he claims, unusually for a survivor, not to dream of those years.

At the time, he didn't dwell on the man whose cap, and life, he stole. The story of the rape, and his survival, was his first mature piece of writing, but even so it hasn't exactly obsessed him - perhaps the title of this translation gives it too much prominence. The title of the original edition was more telling: Self-Portrait with a Scar.