Boris Pahor
1913 – 2022 · Slovenia
Known for: Slovene writer from Trieste whose Necropolis bore witness to the Nazi camps
“He survived in order to bear witness, and bore witness for a century.”
Biography
Boris Pahor was born in Trieste on 26 August 1913, when the city was still the great port of Austria-Hungary and his father worked in its administration. The Treaty of Rapallo placed the family and some three hundred thousand other Slovenes inside the Kingdom of Italy, and after Mussolini came to power the Fascist state set about erasing them. In 1920, aged seven, Pahor watched Blackshirts burn the Slovene Community Hall in Trieste; within a few years Slovene was banned as a language of instruction and Slovene names were Italianised. He was schooled in Italian at a Catholic seminary in Koper and studied theology in Gorizia, teaching himself literary Slovene and publishing his first stories in Ljubljana magazines under a pseudonym.
Drafted into the Italian army in 1940 and sent to Libya, he was later moved to Lombardy as a military translator and enrolled at the University of Padua. After the Italian armistice of September 1943 he returned to a Trieste already under German occupation and joined the Slovene Partisans in the Littoral. The Littoral Home Guard handed him to the Germans along with hundreds of others suspected of aiding the resistance. There followed Dachau, then Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines and Natzweiler-Struthof in Alsace, back to Dachau, on to Mittelbau-Dora and Harzungen, and finally Bergen-Belsen, liberated on 15 April 1945. Out of that year came Nekropola (1967), in which he returns to Natzweiler-Struthof two decades later and walks the terraces of the camp among sightseers. It is the book that carried his name across Europe, translated into English as Pilgrim Among the Shadows and later as Necropolis.
Pahor spent the rest of his life in Trieste, teaching, editing and arguing. His open hostility to Yugoslav communism kept him unpublished and unmentioned in his homeland until Slovenia became independent in 1991, and recognition came only in old age: the French Legion of Honour, the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art, and a Nobel Prize nomination from the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. He refused honorary citizenship of Ljubljana, holding that Slovenian politicians of both left and right had failed the Slovene minority in Italy. He was married to the writer Radoslava Premrl, who died in 2009; at ninety nine he published a book dedicated to her. From September 2019 he was the oldest living survivor of the Holocaust. Boris Pahor died in Trieste on 30 May 2022, aged one hundred and eight.