The first subject Levi brooches is the problem with memory; chiefly, it is fallible and it is also subjective. Each man imprisoned alongside Levi will remember his experience a little differently, and although there will be universal truths and memories that are substantiated by a number of people, as time passes, memories can become less sharp and less defined. This is a problem when it comes to painting a broad picture of something that has happened to a large group of people.
The next subject that he introduces is the way in which the Nazis broke the will of the prisoners. There are various ways in which they were able to do this, not least, starving them and working them to the point of exhaustion. One of the key things that was done to the prisoners was completely dehumanizing them. Their heads were shaved, their clothing taken and replaced with identical striped shirt and pants that looked similar to pajamas. The individual was whittled away and soon the part of every man that was a human was taken away as well. Those who survived were able to remind themselves in small ways every day that they were still human. This was the chief method employed by the Germans to break the prisoners' spirits.
At the camps, prisoners were not permitted to communicate with those on the outside, although sometimes they did, when their particular work detail was working outside the camps, in villages nearby. Sometimes villagers would feel sorry for the prisoners and tell them how the war was progressing. The prisoners would find intricate ways of communicating with each other outside of the guards' hearing and at night they would talk whilst crammed by the hundred into their tiny huts. Levi details how prisoners learned new ways of communication, especially between those who did not share a common language.
The camps were built on a foundation of violence and this is one of the things that Levi looks at in the next essay in the book. Are there different kinds of violence? Is all violence created equal? For example, is the random beating of a prisoner by a guard the same as the beating of a fellow prisoner by a starving and dying man who wants his last piece of bread? This is a difficult question but Levi explains how violence is different depending on the motivation behind it rather than the strength of it.
The Gray Zone; a difficult moral location inhabited by prisoners who worked for the Nazis. Even with the show of force the Germans would display, they often lacked the necessary personnel in camps to keep control of the sheer number of prisoners kept there. They therefore used prisoners to police other prisoners; these men would receive more rations and sometimes access to privileges. They were not Nazis and they were not "one of us" in the eyes of the other prisoners either. They inhabited a sort of moral no man's land, belonging to nobody and liked by neither group. Levi wonders about the nature of these men and considers whether their "survival of the fittest" mentality is the natural reaction to being imprisoned in a death camp where they might be killed at any moment.
The last part of the book consists of letters between Germans and Levi' they ask questions about his experiences and his feelings about his captors, and he answers honestly, describing his ordeal and stating clearly what he sees.
