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.