How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
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.