How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
We travelled here in the sealed wagons; we saw our women and our children leave towards nothingness; we, transformed into slaves, have marched a hundred times backwards and forwards to our silent labors, killed in our spirit long before our anonymous death. No one must leave here and so carry to the world, together with the sign impressed on his skin, the evil tidings of what man's presumption made of man in Auschwitz. (4.79)
What does Levi mean by this? What do you think he's referring to when he says "man's presumption"?
Quote #8
The bell rings suddenly for the last ceremony of the day: "Wer hat kaputt die Schuhe?" (who has broken shoes?), and at once the noise of forty or fifty claimants to the exchange breaks out as they rush towards the Tagesraum in desperate haste, well knowing that only the first ten, on the best of hypotheses, will be satisfied. (5.12)
"Ceremony" here is almost certainly ironic. Think about what a ceremony entails: it's usually a careful, reverent ritual that commemorates some momentous event, like a graduation ceremony. Here, the ceremony is for choosing shoes. And it's far from a careful undertaking. Instead, the prisoners get a few seconds to look at a pile of shoes and choose two that they think will fit. Remember how important shoes are: poorly-fitting ones can spell death for their owner. This makes the shoe-changing ceremony fraught with all kinds of dangers.
Quote #9
In conclusion: theft in Buna, punished by the civil direction, is authorized and encouraged by the SS; theft in camp, severely repressed by the SS, is considered by the civilians as a normal exchange operation; theft among Häftlinge is generally punished, but the punishment strikes the thief and the victim with equal gravity. We now invite the reader to contemplate the possible meaning in the Lager of the words "good" and "evil," "just" and "unjust"; let everybody judge, on the basis of the picture we have outlined and of the examples given above, how much of our ordinary moral world could survive on this side of the barbed wire. (8.28)
Normal morality and ethics just cannot be applied to the goings on in Auschwitz. Everyone has to do what they must to survive. Also notice how Levi lapses into "we" here. He's using a collective voice that emphasizes the "bearing witness" aspect of his text.