How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
During the interrogations that followed, I preferred to admit my status of "Italian citizen of Jewish race." (1.4)
Primo doesn't primarily identify as Jewish; instead, he describes himself in terms of his nationality. Being primarily an "Italian citizen" sure wasn't any protection for him.
Quote #2
We walk up and down without sense, and we talk, everybody talks to everybody else, we make a great noise. The door opens, and a German enters; it is the officer of before. He speaks briefly, the interpreter translates. "The officer says you must be quiet, because this is not a rabbinical school." One sees the words which are not his, the bad words, twist his mouth as they come out, as if he was spitting out a foul taste. (2.12)
Apparently not one to let an opportunity for a good dig at Jews pass him by, this German officer rudely compares the noisy babble of the prisoners to a "rabbinical school," (where pairs of students often loudly and animatedly debated different points of view.)
Quote #3
The walls are covered by curious didactic frescoes: for example, there is the good Häftling, portrayed stripped to the waist, about to diligently soap his sheared and rosy cranium, and the bad Häftling, with a strong Semitic nose and greenish color, bundled up in his ostentatiously stained clothes with a beret on his head, who cautiously dips a finger into the water of the washbasin. (3.7)
Even the artwork in the wash-rooms serves as anti-Jewish propaganda. Of course, the "bad prisoner" example here has exaggerated Jewish features and is shown to be over-the-top filthy. These caricatured depictions of Jews were common on billboards and in newspapers in Germany in the 1930s and early 1940s.
Quote #4
Then one of them took my arm and looked at my number and then both laughed still more strongly. Everyone knows that the 174000s are the Italian Jews, the well-known Italian Jews who arrived two months ago, all lawyers, all with degrees, who were more than a hundred and are now only forty; the ones who do not know how to work, and let their bread be stolen, and are slapped from the morning to the evening. The Germans call them "zwei linke Hände" (two left hands), and even the Polish Jews despise them as they do not speak Yiddish. (4.36)
So, not only are the Italian Jews considered rather useless because they are a bunch of weak smarty-pants (lawyers and other educated professionals), but the other Jews don't like them because they don't speak Yiddish. Speaking this language would have allowed Primo and the other Italian Jews to more easily become part of the community of other Jews in the camp.
Quote #5
They [civilian prisoners] work in separate Kommandos and they have no contact of any sort with the common Häftlinge. In fact, the Lager is for them a punishment, and if they do not die of exhaustion or illness they can expect to return among men; if they could communicate with us, it would create a breach in the wall which keeps us dead to the world, and a ray of light into the mystery which prevails among free men about our condition. For us, on the contrary, the Lager is not a punishment; for us, no end is foreseen and the Lager is nothing but a manner of living assigned to us, without limits of time, in the bosom of the Germanic social organism. (8.16)
See the big difference between the civilian prisoners and the Jewish ones? For the civilians, their imprisonment will eventually end. For the Jews, it is very different. What are they being punished for? For being Jews. They're not there because of any crime they have committed. The implication here is that they are there until they die.
Quote #6
The Jewish prominents form a sad and notable human phenomenon. In them converge present, past and atavistic sufferings, and the tradition of hostility towards the stranger makes them monsters of asociality and insensitivity. (9.14)
Levi is commenting on the group of Jewish prisoners that were part of the command structure of the concentration camps. Because of the things they've endured, and what they're now required to do (brutally oppress their own people), they make ideal guards for the SS. As Jews, they know they can be killed at any moment if the SS thinks they aren't harsh enough with the prisoners.
Quote #7
Alex looks at me blackly on the doorstep; he feels himself in some way responsible for my miserable appearance. He dislikes me because I am Italian, because I am Jewish and because, of all of us, I am the one furthest from his sergeants' mess ideal of virility. (10.26)
Primo is a sort of triple threat to Alex, the Kapo. He's Italian, Jewish, and not a very manly man. This was a common Nazi stereotype of the Jew—as weak and effeminate.
Quote #8
Because that look was not one between two men; and if I had known how completely to explain the nature of that look, which came as if across the glass window of an aquarium between two beings who live in different worlds, I would also have explained the essence of the great insanity of the third Germany.
One felt in that moment, in an immediate manner, what we all thought and said of the Germans. The brain which governed those blue eyes and those manicured hands said: "This is something in front of me belongs to a species which it is obviously opportune to suppress. In this particular case, one has to first make sure that it does not contain some utilizable element." And in my head, like seeds in an empty pumpkin: "Blue eyes and fair hair are essentially wicked. No communication possible. I am a specialist in mine chemistry. I am a specialist in organic syntheses. I am a specialist..." (10.32-33)
To the Germans, the Jews are alien creatures—not essentially human. After Doktor Pannwitz looks at Primo like he's some kind of animal Primo flips this racism on its head and starts to feel that all Germans (or at least the ones with the Aryan features of blonde hair and blue eyes) are evil.
Quote #9
Without hatred, without sneering, Alex wipes his hand on my shoulder, both the palm and the back of the hand, to clean it; he would be amazed, the poor brute Alex, if someone told him that today, on the basis of this action, I judge him and Pannwitz and the innumerable others like him, big and small, in Auschwitz and everywhere. (10.43)
Why is this such a memorable moment for Primo? What is the significance of Alex wiping the grease off onto Primo's shirt "[w]ithout hatred, without sneering"? Why might Alex and Pannwitz be surprised that Primo judges them?
Quote #10
They construct shelters and trenches, they repair the damage, they build, they fight, they command, they organize and they kill. What else could they do? They are Germans. This way of behavior is not meditated and deliberate, but follows from their nature and from the destiny they have chosen. They could not act differently: if you wound the body of a dying man, the wound will begin to heal, even if the whole body dies within a day. (15.20)
Again, Primo gives us a glimpse into what he feels about the German "race." All that they do, he points out, comes from "their nature and the destiny they have chosen." How is this different from or similar to how the Germans stereotype the Jews?