How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
We have never seen its boundaries, but we feel all around us the evil presence of the barbed wire that separates us from the world. And on the scaffolding, on the trains being switched about, on the roads, in the pits, in the offices, men and more men, slaves and masters, the masters slaves themselves. Fear motivates the former, hatred the later, all other forces are silent. All are enemies or rivals. (4.2)
Within Auschwitz, there is no real hope for forming communities. Everyone fears everyone else. The barbed wire surrounding the entire prison complex is just the outer boundary of several interconnected, smaller prisons: the work pits and the offices.
Quote #5
Ka-Be is the Lager without its physical discomforts. So that, whoever still has some seeds of conscience, feels his conscience re-awaken; and in the long empty days, one speaks of other things than hunger and work and one begins to consider what they have made us become, how much they have taken away from us, what this life is. In this Ka-Be, an enclosure of relative peace, we have learnt that our personality is fragile, that it is much more in danger than our life; and the old wise ones, instead of warning us "remember that you must die," would have done much better to remind us of this greater danger that threatens us. If from inside the Lager, a message could have seeped out to free men, it would have been this: take care not to suffer in your own homes what is inflicted on us here.
When one works, one suffers and there is no time to think: our homes are less than a memory. But here the time is ours: from bunk to bunk, despite the prohibition, we exchange visits and we talk and we talk. The wooden hut, crammed with suffering humanity, is full of words, memories, and of another pain. "Heimweh" the Germans call this pain; it is a beautiful word, it means "longing for one's home." (4.77-78)
It's only when Primo is placed in the infirmary for his sliced foot, and is away from the deprivations of the main camp, that he has a chance to understand exactly where he is and what he's missing. The English "homesick" is too mild a term; instead, the German word is more applicable, and translates more closely to "home longing."
Quote #6
We can now ask who is this man Elias. If he is a madman, incomprehensible and para-human, who ended in the Lager by chance. If he is an atavism, different from our modern world, and better adapted to the primordial conditions of camp life. Or if he is perhaps a product of the camp itself, what we will all become if we do not die in the camp, and if the camp itself does not end first.
There is some truth in all three suppositions. Elias has survived the destruction from outside, because he is physically indestructible; he has resisted the annihilation from within because he is insane. So, in the first place, he is a survivor: he is the most adaptable, the human type most suited to this way of living.
If Elias regains liberty he will be confined to the fringes of human society, in a prison or a lunatic asylum. But here in the Lager there are no criminals nor madmen, no criminals because there is no moral law to contravene, no madmen because we are wholly devoid of free will, as our every action is, in time and place, the only conceivable one. (9.35-37)
In some ways, Elias is more "free" than the other prisoners, because something within him defies the camp. Primo can't figure out if he's just a survivor at his core, or if the camp has created this trait within him. What's ironic about his survival instinct is that the very traits that make him able to live within Auschwitz would doom him to prison or a mental institution if he were living on the outside.