How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
But this was the sense, not forgotten either then or later: that precisely because the Lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts, we must not become beasts; that even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization. We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last—the power to refuse our consent. So we must certainly wash our faces without soap in dirty water and dry ourselves on our jackets. We must polish our shoes, not because the regulation states it, but for dignity and propriety. We must walk erect, without dragging our feet, not in homage to Prussian discipline, but to remain alive, not to begin to die. (3.12)
And this, Shmoopers, is one of the most important lessons Primo learns while he is in the Lager. Courtesy of Steinlauf, the prisoner who makes it a point to get as clean as possible, Primo realizes that if you don't at least try to maintain the barest semblance of civilization and humanity, the Nazis will have succeeded in making them into beasts.
Quote #5
The sleeper is coated with snow and mud; at every step it knocks against my ear and the snow slides down my neck. After fifty steps I am at the limit of what a person is theoretically able to support: my knees bend, my shoulder aches as if pressed in a vice, my equilibrium is in danger. At every step I feel my shoes sucked away by the greedy mud, by this omnipresent Polish mud whose monotonous horror fills our days.
I bite deeply into my lips; we know well that to gain a small, extraneous pain serves as a stimulant to mobilize our last reserves of energy. The Kapos also know it: some of them beat us from pure bestiality and violence, but others beat us when we are under a load almost lovingly, accompanying the blows with exhortations, as cart-drivers do with willing horses. (6.12-13)
Using almost his last reserves of strength and willpower, Primo struggles to move the "sleeper" (a ginormous wooden beam). He deliberately inflicts pain on himself to keep himself going under the heavy burden.
Quote #6
The conviction that life has a purpose is rooted in every fibre of man, it is a property of the human substance. Free men give many names to this purpose, and many think and talk about its nature. But for us the question is simpler.
Today, in this place, our only purpose is to reach the spring. At the moment we care about nothing else. Behind this aim there is not at the moment any other aim. In the morning while we wait endlessly lined up in the roll-call square for the time to leave for work, while every breath of wind penetrates our clothes and runs in violent shivers over our defenseless bodies, and everything is grey around us, and we are grey; in the morning, when it is still dark, we all look at the sky in the east to spot the first signs of a milder season, and the rising of the sun is commented on every day: today a little earlier than yesterday, today a little warmer than yesterday, in two months, in a month, the cold will call a truce and we will have one enemy less. (7.1-2)
Primo is pointing out here that free men have the luxury of speculating about life's greater purpose. In the Lager, though, everything boils down to sheer animal survival. There is no room for philosophy: the prisoners have to merely survive the hunger, the cold, and the diseases that rip through the camp. They live moment-to-moment. Finding the slimmest sign of hope might keep you going for another day.