How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
Dawn came on us like a betrayer; it seemed as though the new sun rose as an ally of our enemies to assist in our destruction. The different emotions that overcame us, of resignation, of futile rebellion, of religious abandon, of fear, of despair, now joined together after a sleepless night in a collective, uncontrolled panic. The time for meditation, the time for decision was over, and all reason dissolved into a tumult, across which flashed the happy memories of our homes, still so near in time and space, as painful as the thrusts of a sword.
Many things were then said and done among us; but of these it is better that there remain no memory. (1.14-15)
Normally, "dawn" is a symbol for new beginnings and hope. Here, Levi ominously describes it as a "betrayer." The prisoners are almost certainly going to their deaths, and the things they say and do before their departure are best left hidden—even though they are said and done in the light of a new day.
Quote #2
Thus, in an instant, our women, our parents, our children disappeared. We saw them for a short while as an obscure mass at the other end of the platform; then we saw nothing more. (1.32)
Imagine having your family suddenly taken from you in the blink of an eye, not knowing what was going to happen. That's precisely what Primo and his fellow prisoners experienced. They don't even get a clear look at them in this last moment; they are merely "an obscure mass," undifferentiated and anonymous.
Quote #3
Then for the first time we became aware that our language lacks words to express this offence, the demolition of a man. In a moment, with almost prophetic intuition, the reality was revealed to us: we had reached the bottom. It is not possible to sink lower than this; no human condition is more miserable than this, nor could it conceivably be so. Nothing belongs to us anymore; they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand. They will even take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we will have to find in ourselves the strength to do so, to manage somehow so that behind the name something of us, of us as we were, still remains. (2.21)
This "demolition of man" that the Nazis are trying to accomplish is so horrible that the Italian (and probably all others) language cannot even begin to express the concept. Instead, a new language arising from the camps is needed to capture the horrors.
Quote #4
Imagine now a man who is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his house, his habits, his clothes, in short of everything he possesses: he will be a hollow man, reduced to suffering and needs, forgetful of dignity and restraint, for he who loses all often easily loses himself…it is in this way that one can understand the double sense of the term "extermination camp." (2.26)
The process of dehumanization takes place quickly in the camp by taking away all signs of the prisoners' identities in their lives as free men. It's not only the physical self that can be exterminated.
Quote #5
I have learned that I am Haftling. My number is 174517. (2.27)
The destruction of identity is complete. The men are now prisoners, known by their numbers. It's interesting that in science fiction stories, robots are often known by their numbers. We all know the difference between a person and a non-person: we have names.
Quote #6
"When this music plays we know that our comrades, out in the fog, are marching like automatons; their souls are dead and the music drives them, like the wind drives dead leaves, and takes the place of their wills. There is no longer any will: every beat of the drum becomes a step, a reflected contraction of exhausted muscles. The Germans have succeeded in this. They are ten thousand and they are a single grey machine; they are exactly determined; they do not think and they do not desire, they walk." (4.47).
One of the defining qualities of a man is his will. We can make choices and plans; we assume that our actions can have some effect in the world. In Auschwitz, the system is designed to destroy the will and with it, a sense of oneself as a human being.
Quote #7
The Kapo comes to us periodically and calls: 'Wer hat noch zu fressen?' He does not say it from derision or to sneer, but because of this way of eating on our feet, furiously, burning our mouths and throats, without time to breathe, really is fressen, the way of eating of animals, and certainly not essen, the human way of eating, seated in front of a table, religiously. Fressen is exactly the word. (7.26)
Nothing reduces a man to a beast more than starvation, because nothing else matters except finding food. The men in the camp start to eat like animals, wolfing down their food.
Quote #8
[I]f I could enclose all the evil of our time in one image, I would choose this image which is familiar to me: an emaciated man, with head dropped and shoulders curved, on whose face and in whose eyes not a trace of a thought is to be seen. (9.11)
One of the key images of the Holocaust is the emaciated bodies (both dead and alive) of the prisoners when the world finally found out about these horrors. But Primo tells us again and again that the absence of thought or will is a kind of death as well.
Quote #9
Whoever does not die will suffer minute by minute, all day, every day: from the morning before dawn until the distribution of the evening soup we will have to keep our muscles continually tensed, dance from foot to foot, beat our arms under our shoulders against the cold. We will have to spend bread to acquire gloves, and lose hours of sleep to repair them when they become unstitched. As it will no longer be possible to eat in the open, we will have to eat our meals in the hut, on our feet, everyone will be assigned an area of floor as large as a hand, as it is forbidden to rest against the bunks. Wounds will open on everyone's hands, and to be given a bandage will mean waiting every evening for hours on one's feet in the snow and wind. (13.2)
The pitiless cold of the Polish winter adds an entirely new level of brutality to the already unsurvivable conditions of the camp.
Quote #10
[R]agged, decrepit, skeleton-like patients at all able to move dragged themselves everywhere on the frozen soil, like an invasion of worms. They had ransacked all the empty huts in search of food and wood; they had violated with senseless fury the grotesquely adorned rooms of the hated Blockältese, forbidden to the ordinary Häftlinge until the previous day; no longer in control of their own bowels, they had fouled everywhere, polluting the precious snow, the only source of water remaining in the whole camp. (17.49)
Keep in mind that the prisoners left after the evacuation were predominantly ill from various communicable diseases. One of these is dysentery, which is a horrible disease with the major symptom of bloody diarrhea. The conditions of the camp get even worse (if that can be imagined!) after the Nazis leave, because the ill men are scrounging around for anything that might help with their survival, and they aren't in control of their bodily functions. They are reduced to a barely human level of functioning, driven only by the search for food and warmth.