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 independence 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 Marxist 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.
Early life under Italian Fascism
Pahor was born on 26 August 1913 into a Slovene minority community in Trieste, the main port of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the capital of the Austrian Littoral region at the time. Pahor's father Franc was born in Kostanjevica na Krasu, a settlement that was severely ravaged by the Battles of the Isonzo during the First World War. Franc married Marija Ambrožič and found a job in Trieste as a civil servant in the Austro-Hungarian administration.
Under the Treaty of Rapallo, the Kingdom of Italy annexed territories which included a substantial ethnic Slovene 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 totalitarianisms in the name of Christian humanist and communitarian values. Pahor considered himself a pantheist.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 Fascist Italy 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 personalist 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.
Surviving Nazism and concentration camps
In 1940, Pahor was drafted into the Italian army and sent to fight in Libya. In 1941, he was transferred to Lombardy, where he worked as a military translator. At the same time, he enrolled at the University of Padua, where he studied Italian literature. After the Italian armistice in September 1943, he returned to Trieste, which had already fallen under Nazi occupation. After a few weeks in the German-occupied city, he decided to join the Slovene Partisans active in the Slovenian Littoral. In 1955, he described these crucial weeks of his life in the novel Mesto v zalivu (The City on the Bay), a story about a young Slovene intellectual from Trieste, wondering about what action to take confronted with the highly complex personal and political context of World War II on the border between Italy and Slovenia.
The Littoral Home Guard—a local Slovene anti-communist and anti-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.
Opposing communism
Pahor returned to Trieste at the end of 1946 when the area was under Allied military administration. In 1947, he graduated from the University of Padua with a bachelor's thesis on the poetry of Edvard Kocbek. The same year, he met Kocbek for the first time. The two men were united in their criticism of the communist regime in Yugoslavia and established a close friendship that lasted until Kocbek's death in 1981.
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 Titoist 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 () 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.
Later years and recognition
Recognition in Slovenia
After 1990, Pahor gained widespread recognition in Slovenia. He was awarded the Prešeren Award, the highest recognition for cultural achievements in Slovenia, in 1992. In 2008, he was awarded the Gold Order of Freedom. In May 2009, Pahor became a full member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
2010 Documentary film In 2010, a documentary Trmasti spomin (The Stubborn Memory) was screened on primetime on the Slovenian National Television Broadcast, featuring several famous public figures who speak about Pahor, including a Slovene philosopher, Evgen Bavčar, who lives and works in Paris, two Slovene historians from Trieste, Marta Verginella and Jože Pirjevec, Italian writer Claudio Magris from Trieste, French literary critic Antoine Spire, Italian journalist Paolo Rumiz, and Slovene literary historian Miran Košuta from Trieste.
Honorary Ljubljana Citizen proposal