What role do friendships play with the prisoners?

If anything, I think that chapter 4 illustrates how any friendships are strained because of the inhuman conditions.

Stripped of their possessions and outward vestiges of humanity, the deportees must satisfy their most basic and animalistic urges of hunger, instinct, and deception in order to survive. From the French Jewess’s deception to the battles to beg, borrow, or steal another morsel of bread, the captives have been systematically transformed into a degeneration of their former humane selves.