Boris Pahor, the writer who narrated the horror of the concentration camps, died at the age of 108

Slovenian, from Trieste, 108 years old, historical memory of the horrors of the twentieth century on linguistic minorities. To his books he always united the commitment to pass on the testimony to young people.

Born in Trieste in 1913, the writer’s life is closely linked to the historical events of his homeland and to the experience of the Slovenian community of Venezia Giulia. Pahor has been a point of reference for young Slovenian literati, has always been a defender of freedom and dignity of the individual, and has put at the center of his books, about thirty fiction and non-fiction translated into different languages, the humiliated and offended him. Winner of numerous literary awards, in 2007 he was awarded the Legion of Honor and in 2020 the title of Knight of the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic.

He was one of the most important and most translated Slovenian-language writers, he passed the century: Pahor was born, in fact, in Trieste, the city where he still lives, in via del Monte, in front of the old Jewish cemetery, on August 26, 1913 as the firstborn and only son of Slovenian parents. His father Franc was, during the Habsburg rule, a photographer in the criminal section of the Trieste gendarmerie. The city, the main port of the Habsburg Empire, was, at his birth, a “happy city”, as Pahor himself defined it, in which numerous ethnic groups and religious communities coexisted.

The writer’s existence was closely linked to that of the Slovenian community of Venezia Giulia, marked by the historical events that changed the destinies of Europe and the world starting from the First World War, of which Pahor remembers, very little, the bombings, describing the experience in the novella Nesluteno vprašanje (A question without foreboding): during the war, in fact, his father Franc was sent to Pola which was a military area as it was the seat of the Austrian arsenal. In 1918, when the Spanish fever epidemic broke out, the whole family fell ill. The younger sister, Mimica, succumbs.

In November of the same year the Italian army entered Trieste: the Peace of Versailles had ratified the Italian requests sanctioned by the 1915 Pact of London. After the signing of the 1920 Rapallo Treaty, the entire Slovenian coastal region called Primorska was annexed to Italy: between 500,000 and 700,000 Slovenes and Croats become Italian citizens. Despite the solemn promises, published in the decree of the Italian governor of Venezia Giulia, General Carlo Petitti di Roreto, whose text is even read in churches, since 1920 the Slovenian community becomes the target of squad attacks and thus begins a heavy work of denationalization: on July 13, 1920 P. with his sister Evelina witnesses the fire of the Narodni dom – the Slovenian culture house in Trieste, a multipurpose building, designed by the architect Max Fabiani, symbol of the economic and cultural rise of the Slovenian bourgeoisie of Trieste . The building was destroyed by the flames of the squadron and fascist fury, representing a real break in the history of Trieste. Experience marks P. forever. He writes about it in the very famous short story Grmada v pristanu (The stake in the port) from which the collection of short prose with which, in 2001, he made his debut in the Italian national literary panorama (Edizioni Nicolodi, Rovereto) takes its name. This fire of 1920 was followed, especially after 1922, by other fires and pogroms, the prohibition of the use of the Slovenian language, the forced suppression of schools in the Slovenian language and of all Slovenian cultural or sporting activities: the fascist regime wanted to Italianise by decree thousands of Slovenian names and surnames from all over the Venezia Giulia area. The trauma of denied identity is experienced by the writer in a dramatic way especially when, after having attended the first four classes of the elementary school with Slovenian teaching language in Roiano (1920-1924), he is forced to study in Italian. He finished elementary school in via Ruggero Manna in Trieste in 1924-25 and then enrolled in the Commercial Institute which he attended between 1926 and 1928 with little profit.

Pahor had paid for his membership in a linguistic minority