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