Boris Pahor

Boris Pahor (Trieste, 1913 – Trieste, 2022) was a Slovene novelist born in Trieste, a city that passed from Austro-Hungarian rule to the Kingdom of Italy after the First World War. He wrote in Slovene, the language of his minority community, and his work is read as a witness account of Slovene life under Italian Fascism and of Nazi deportation. After the death of Marko Feingold in 2019, he became the oldest living Holocaust survivor.

His childhood unfolded under Fascism. In 1920 he watched the Slovene Community Hall in Trieste burn, and once Slovene was banned from classrooms he was schooled in Italian. He trained in Catholic seminaries, later took a degree at Padua, and from 1953 to 1975 taught Italian literature at a Trieste high school with Slovene as its language of instruction. During the war he was sent to Libya and, after the Italian armistice of 1943, joined the Slovene Partisans. In 1944 collaborators arrested him and he was deported to Natzweiler-Struthof, Dachau, Mittelbau-Dora, Harzungen and finally Bergen-Belsen, liberated in April 1945. That ordeal shaped much of his writing, which uses a spare, fragmented prose that mixes memory, reflection and moral judgment.

Pahor distanced himself from Yugoslav communism and held liberal democratic views, which delayed recognition of his work in Slovenia until independence in 1991. His novel Nekropola, published in 1967, took years to reach other languages; in English it appeared as Pilgrim Among the Shadows in 1995 and as Necropolis in 2010. He edited the journal Zaliv, received the Prešeren Award in 1992 and the French Legion of Honour in 2007. His work is often compared with that of Primo Levi, Jorge Semprún and Imre Kertész, and his legacy lies in testimony that links the memory of the camps with that of a persecuted minority.