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Boris Pahor, OMRI (; 26 August 1913 – 30 May 2022) Profile of Boris Pahor was a Slovene novelist from Trieste, Italy, who was best known for his heartfelt descriptions of life as a member of the Slovenian minority in pre–Second World War increasingly fascist Italy as well as a Nazi concentration camp survivor. In his novel Necropolis he visits the Natzweiler-Struthof camp twenty years after his relocation to Dachau. Following Dachau, he was relocated three more times: to Mittelbau-Dora, to Harzungen, and finally to Bergen-Belsen, which was liberated on 15 April 1945.
His success was not immediate; openly expressing his disapproval of communism in Yugoslavia, he was not acknowledged and was probably intentionally not recognized by his homeland until after Slovenia had gained its Ten-Day War in 1991. His autobiographical novel Nekropola, published in 1967, was first translated into English (in 1995) as Pilgrim Among the Shadows, and secondly (in 2010) as Necropolis. The novel has also been translated into several other languages.
Pahor was a prominent public figure in the Slovene minority in Italy, who were affected by Fascist Italianization. Although a member of the Slovene Partisans, he opposed Marxism communism. He was awarded the Legion of Honour by the French government and the Cross of Honour for Science and Art by the Austrian government, and was nominated for the Nobel prize for literature by the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Boris Pahor was nominated for the Nobel prize , ff.uni-lj.si (Slovenian) He refused the title of honorary citizen of the capital of Slovenia because he believed that the Slovene minority in Italy (1920–47) was not supported the way it ought to have been during the period of Fascist Italianization by right-wing or left-wing Slovenian political elites. Pahor was married to the author Radoslava Premrl (1921–2009) and wrote a book dedicated to her at the age of 99. Boris Pahor turns 99 , slovenia.si; accessed 18 September 2015. In addition to Slovene and Italian, he was fluent in French. Following the death of Marko Feingold on 19 September 2019, he became the oldest living survivor of the Holocaust.
Under the Treaty of Rapallo, the Kingdom of Italy annexed territories which included a substantial ethnic Slovenes population, and that included a quarter of Slovene ethnic territory and approximately 330,000 out of total population of 1.3Lipušček, U. (2012) Sacro egoismo: Slovenci v krempljih tajnega londonskega pakta 1915, Cankarjeva založba, Ljubljana. million Slovenes.Cresciani, Gianfranco (2004) Clash of civilisations , Italian Historical Society Journal, Vol. 12, No. 2, p. 4 After the annexation, and even more after Benito Mussolini came to power in 1922, the forced Fascist Italianization of the Slovene minority began.
In 1920, Italian Black shirts in Trieste burned down the Slovene Community Hall (), which the young Pahor witnessed. All non-Italian languages (including Slovene and German) were forbidden as languages of instruction by the Fascist regime three years after this event. Between 1926 and 1932, all Slovene, Croatian, and German toponyms as well as first and last names began to be subjected to Italianization—during which also his future wife's name (Radoslava) was changed to Francesca. Fascism had a traumatizing effect on young Pahor, which he remembered in an interview for Delo two months before his 100th birthday:
Pahor later wrote about this childhood memory in one of his later novels, Trg Oberdan (Oberdan Square), named after the square on which the Slovene Community Hall stood, and also in essays.
He enrolled in an Italian-language Catholic seminary in Koper, and graduated in 1935. He then went to Gorizia to study theology, leaving in 1938. The 1936 Fascist attack on Slovene choirmaster Lojze Bratuž—who was kidnapped, tortured, and killed on Christmas Eve because his choirs continued singing in Slovene—was later referred to by Pahor as confirming his dedication to anti-Fascism and the Slovene ethnic cause, as well as a lifelong intellectual opposition to all in the name of Christian humanist and Communitarianism values. Pahor considered himself a pantheism.Tina Bernik: Ne vidi lepše prihodnosti za Slovenijo. Z24.si July 14, 2013. Although no public and private use of Slovene was allowed and the relations between Slovenes living in Italian Fascism and those from the Kingdom of Yugoslavia were forcibly cut off, Pahor nevertheless managed to publish his first short stories in several magazines in Ljubljana (then part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia) under the pseudonym Jožko Ambrožič, after he began to study standard Slovene during his stay in Capodistria and Gorizia.
In 1939, he established contact with the Slovenian Personalism poet and thinker Edvard Kocbek. Boris Pahor v Tivoliju o Edvardu Kocbeku, delo.si, 26 August 2013 (in Slovenian). Kocbek introduced him to contemporary literary trends and helped him improve his use of standard Slovene. In 1938, he returned to Trieste, where he established close contacts with the few Slovene intellectuals who were still working underground in Trieste, including poet Stanko Vuk and some members of the Slovene militant anti-fascist organization TIGR.
The Littoral Home Guard—a local Slovene language anti-communist and anti-Slovene Partisan military organization in Slovene Littoral that was directly subordinated to Odilo Globocnik—handed 600 persons suspected of involvement with or sympathy to the resistance over to the Nazis, among them Boris Pahor. The Nazi administration first transported him to Dachau, from which he was relocated to Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines (Markirch) and Natzweiler-Struthof in Alsace. From there he was sent back to Dachau, Mittelbau-Dora, Harzungen, and finally to Bergen-Belsen, which was liberated on 15 April 1945. The concentration camp experience became the major inspiration for Pahor's work, which has been frequently compared to that of Primo Levi, Imre Kertész, or Jorge Semprún. Between April 1945 and December 1946, Pahor recovered at a French sanatorium in Villers-sur-Marne, Île-de-France.
In 1951 and 1952, Pahor defended Kocbek's literary work against the organized attacks launched by the Slovenian communist establishment and its allies in the Free Territory of Trieste. This resulted in a break with the local leftist circles, with which Pahor had been engaged since 1946. He grew closer to Liberal Democratic positions and in 1966, together with fellow writer from Trieste Alojz Rebula, he founded the journal Zaliv ( The Bay), in which he sought to defend "traditional democratic pluralism" against the totalitarian cultural policies of communist Yugoslavia.
The journal Zaliv was published in Slovene in Trieste in Italy outside of reach of communist Yugoslavian authorities. This enabled Zaliv to become an important platform for democratic discussion, in which many dissidents from communist Slovenia could publish their opinions. Pahor discontinued the journal in 1990, after the victory of the Democratic Opposition of Slovenia in the first free elections in Slovenia after World War II.
Between 1953 and 1975, Pahor worked as an Italian literature instructor in a Slovene-language high school in Trieste. During this time, he was an active member of the international organization AIDLCM ( Association internationale des langues et cultures minoritaires), which aims to promote minority languages and cultures. In this function, he travelled around Europe discovering the cultural plurality of the continent. This experience strengthened his communitarian and anti-centralist views.
In 1969, Pahor was one of the co-founders of the political party Slovene Left ( Slovenska levica), established to represent all Slovene leftist voters in Italy who did not agree with the strategy adopted by the Slovene Titoism groups after 1962 of participating in the mainstream Italian political parties (mostly the Communist Party of Italy and the Socialist Party of Italy). Profile, slovenskaskupnost.org; accessed 18 September 2015 (in Slovenian). The party eventually merged with the Slovene Union. Pahor publicly supported the Slovene Union on several occasions, and ran on its tickets for general and local elections.
In 1975, Pahor and Alojz Rebula published a book in Trieste, entitled Edvard Kocbek: pričevalec našega časa ( Edvard Kocbek: Witness to Our Time) and the 1975 Zaliv Scandal followed. Pahor, who lived in Italy and was an Italian citizen, was banned from entering Yugoslavia for several years. He was able to enter Yugoslavia only in 1981 when he was allowed to attend Kocbek's funeral. In 1989, his book Ta ocean strašnó odprt ( This Ocean, So Terribly Open) published in Slovenia by the Slovene Society (Slovenska matica) publishing house, was dedicated to Pahor's memories of Kocbek and marked one of the first steps towards the final rehabilitation of Kocbek's public image in post-communist Slovenia.
In 2008, an influential article entitled Il caso Pahor" ("The Pahor Case"), deploring the fact that the author had remained unknown in Italy for so long and blaming the Italian nationalist milieu of Trieste for it, was published in the Italian journal La Repubblica:
In 2008, Pahor was interviewed for the first time by RAI (Italian National Public Television). The interview was aired as part of the Che tempo che fa, a primetime Sunday talk show on the Italian public TV's third channel.
In 2009, Pahor refused to accept an award by the mayor of Trieste Roberto Dipiazza because the mayor did not mention Italian Fascism alongside Nazism and communism, causing a controversy on the political right in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, resonating in the Italian media. However, support of Pahor's decision was voiced by renowned Italian left wing intellectuals, including the astrophysicist and popular science writer Margherita Hack and the Trieste-based Association of Free and Equal Citizens ( Associazione cittadini liberi ed uguali), offering an alternative award that would explicitly mention anti-Fascism.
The event was considered a "historical step" in the normalization of relations between Italians and Slovenes in Trieste, and was attended by numerous Slovenian and Italian dignitaries. Profile, vlada.si; accessed 18 September 2015 (in Slovenian). After the performance, Pahor declared that he could finally feel himself to be a first-rate citizen of Trieste.
Pahor's major works include Vila ob jezeru (A Villa by the Lake), Mesto v zalivu (The City on the Bay), Nekropola (Pilgrim among the Shadows), a trilogy about Trieste and the Slovene minority in Italy (1920–1947) Spopad s pomladjo (A Difficult Spring), Zatemnitev (Obscuration), V labirintu (In the Labyrinth), and Zibelka sveta (The Cradle of the World).
Five of his books have been translated into German.
In 2007, he publicly supported the candidacy of the Liberal politician Mitja Gaspari for president of Slovenia. In 2009, he ran on the list of the South Tyrolean People's Party as a representative of the Slovene Union for the European Parliament. In 2011, before the Slovenian early elections, he publicly supported the Slovenian People's Party.
In March 2012, the Italian right wing newspaper Il Giornale published a book review of his autobiography titled "Nobody's Son", in which the book reviewer labels Pahor a "Slovene nationalist" and "negationist" for his agreement with the historian Alessandra Kersevan's criticism of historical revisionism in Italy regarding foibe killings. The book review reproached Pahor for making personal observations about the period of Yugoslav occupation of Trieste (between May and June 1945), implying that he witnessed the events, although he did not reside in the city at the time. Il Giornale reproaches Pahor, ilgiornale.it; accessed 18 September 2015.
In August 2013, Pahor criticized Giorgio Napolitano and Janez Janša for not explicitly mentioning Italian Fascism alongside German Nazism and Slovenian/Yugoslav communism. Pahor o Janši in Napolitanu, Primorski Dnevnik, 28 August 2013 (in Slovenian).
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