How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
We also know that not even this tenuous principle of discrimination between fit and unfit was always followed, and that later the simpler method was often adopted of merely opening both the doors of the wagon without warning or instructions to the new arrivals. Those who by chance climbed down on one side of the convoy entered the camp; the others went to the gas chamber. (1.30)
If things operated logically, the "fit" prisoners wouldn't be killed when they arrived at the camp; they would be put to work. Not here, though. A much more arbitrary system is used—one dictated by blind chance.
Quote #2
We looked at each other without a word. It was all incomprehensible and mad, but one thing we had understood. This was the metamorphosis that awaited us. Tomorrow we would be like them. (1.34)
Primo has just seen the exhausted prisoners marching into the roll-call square in time to the orchestral music. Since he's new to the Lager, this looks ridiculous and makes absolutely no sense. On one level, though, he understands that he will become one of these "puppets."
Quote #3
We have a terrible thirst. The weak gurgle of the water in the radiators makes us ferocious; we have had nothing to drink for four days. But there is also a tap—and above it a card which says that it is forbidden to drink as the water is dirty. Nonsense. It seems obvious that the card is a joke, "they" know that we are dying of thirst and they put us in a room, and there is a tap, and Wassertrinken Verboten. I drink and I incite my companions to do likewise, but I have to spit it out, the water is tepid and sweetish, with the smell of a swamp. (2.2)
It's almost like Primo is going through a very methodical exercise in logic. He's thirsty, and there's water here, so he will drink and ignore the illogical sign. Okay—so this doesn't shake out into a neat syllogism, but still, the guy's trying to apply reason to an inherently unreasonable situation. To Primo, it is utterly ridiculous for thirsty prisoners to be cooped up with what appears to him a perfectly good water tap, and be told by a sign that it's forbidden to drink.
Quote #4
The rites to be carried out were infinite and senseless: every morning one had to make the "bed" perfectly flat and smooth; smear one's muddy and repellent wooden shoes with the appropriate machine grease; scrape the mud-stains off one's clothes (paint, grease and rust-stains were, however, permitted); in the evening one had to undergo the control for lice and the control of washing one's feet; on Saturday, have one's beard and hair shaved, mend or have mended one's rags; on Sunday, undergo the general control for skin diseases and the control of buttons on one's jacket, which had to be five. (2.57)
All these rituals and tasks that the prisoners must complete are absolutely senseless considering the larger living conditions that surround them and the fact that they're in an extermination camp.
These arbitrary rules were created to control the prisoners and break their spirits. The repetition of "control" here drives home this point. There's some twisted sense to the senselessness.
Quote #5
Various theories circulate to justify this incapacity of ours [to keep bread for a long time after a meal is served]: bread eaten a little at a time is not wholly assimilated; the nervous tension needed to preserve the bread without touching it when one is hungry is in the highest degree harmful and debilitating; bread which is turning stale soon loses its alimentary value, so that the sooner it is eaten, the more nutritious it is; Alberto says that hunger and bread in one's pocket are terms of opposite sign which automatically cancel each other out and cannot exist in the same individual. (7.22)
The prisoners come up with all sorts of theories to justify why they cannot keep their bread much after they are given it. None of these have any sort of basis in fact, but they are all struggling to come up with explanations and theorems for the world they are now living in. It's human nature to try to explain what happens to us.
Quote #6
To sink is the easiest of matters; it is enough to carry out all the orders one receives, to eat only the ration, to observe the discipline of the work and the camp. Experience showed that only exceptionally could one survive more than three months in this way. All the mussulmans who finished in the gas chambers have the same story, or more exactly, have no story; they followed the slope down to the bottom, like streams that run down to the sea. On their entry into the camp, through basic incapacity, or by misfortune, or through some banal incident, they are overcome before they can adapt themselves; they are beaten by time, they do not begin to learn German, to disentangle the infernal knot of laws and prohibitions until their body is already in decay, and nothing can save them from selections or from death by exhaustion. Their life is short, but their number is endless; they, the Muselmänner, the drowned, form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non-men who march and labor in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to really suffer. One hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand. (9.10)
Only blind luck or the arbitrary decisions of others ("some banal incident") form the dividing line between being a "mussulman" or not. Survival, then, is very much dictated by the whims of fortune in the Lager; it's not something that most prisoners can usually control.
Quote #7
Clausner shows me the bottom of his bowl. Where others have carved their numbers, and Alberto and I our names, Clausner has written: "Ne pas chercher à comprendre." (10.14)
The French here means "do not look for understanding" (or "do not search for a reason"). As a motto in the camp, it makes a lot of sense. To Clausner, the Chemistry Examination is just plain ridiculous, because why would the Germans now have a need for chemists? The whole premise is absurd and they shouldn't even try to understand it. As the SS officer tells Primo in the very beginning when he asks why he can't have the icicle, "There is no why" in Auschwitz.
Quote #8
Today, at this very moment as I sit writing at a table, I myself am not convinced that these things really happened. (10.16)
Looking back on his entire experience, everything seems so absurd and senseless that Levi can't even be sure that these things happened. In a world governed by logic and reason, they would have been impossible.
Quote #9
The reputation of good luck, as we have said elsewhere, shows itself of fundamental utility to whosoever knows how to surround himself by it. (12.17)
It's not even having good luck, but just the aura of having good luck, that boost a prisoner's chances for survival.
Quote #10
There is nothing surprising about these mistakes: the examination is too quick and summary, and in any case, the important thing for the Lager is not that the most useless prisoners be eliminated, but that free posts be quickly created, according to a certain percentage previously fixed. (13.31)
The dreaded selections are the central symbol for absurdity and arbitrariness in the book. Nothing about them makes any sense, since the selections aren't even made on the basis of the Nazis' own rules (selecting the healthy to remain and work). Primo hints that there is some logic behind this that is only known to the Nazis.