In 1967 he published the novel Nekropola (Necropolis), in which Boris Pahor managed to enter through the narrow door of universal literature: the Slovenian writer who had just died at 108 years of age reported what he had lived in a Nazi concentration camp. This work turned one of the great storytellers of the Holocaust.

And yet, it seems to be worth emphasising a few things when we speak of a language with few speakers – 2.5 million people speak of Slovenian – “Pahor is not only a Slovenian author, it is also a global one”, we could read that on Monday in the digital edition of the Dnevnik newspaper in that country, the size of the deceased was somehow greater than the size of the language he used.

In the same news, Peter Kova? i? Peršin, who collaborated with Paesa in Zaliv magazine in the 1970s, highlighted two characteristics of the writer: “The first, his struggle to build a republic of freedom against ideologies and totalitarianisms. The second is an immediate literary and journalistic work; the Necropolis and other works are world classics. There has always been a guiding thread in it: love of the mother tongue. He is the apostle of the Slovenian, in an atmosphere that is still against him today.”

For the Slovenian against the fascists

Born in Trieste in 1913, when the city still depended on the Austria-Hungary empire, in his childhood and adolescence he experienced the rise of Italian fascism: he saw how they smoked the National House of the Slovenes in 1920; and when he started school, the Mussolini subalternates had the Slovenian completely banned, both in public and private spaces. Severe persecution for many years: The arrest, torture and death of choir director Lojze Bratuà in 1936 also profoundly affected Paco. This environment did not stimulate him: he learned the standard form of his language and began publishing his first pseudonymous works.

Edvard Kocbe’s knowledge of the poet marked a milestone in his career: he realized the most modern literary trends and helped him work writing. At the same time, in the late 1930s, it maintained a close relationship with the Slovenian anti-fascists. He was also in charge of publishing two magazines until he was arrested: he first met the concentration camp. Non-longitudinal: In 1940 he was forced to travel to Libya with the Italian army. Italy II. After his chapter in the World War, he returns to Trieste and joins the Fronte de Libération de la Nación Slovenia, until his arrest in 1944. In the hands of the Germans he met two concentration camps: Natzweiler - Struthof and Bergen - Belsen.

Return to concentration camp

He returned to Natzweiler-Struthof about 20 years after the end of the war. Faced with that field of death that had already become a museum, memory began to work for that horrible memory, suffering, hunger, cold, humiliation, blows, insults and a terrible sorrow, for that horror that seems inexplicable for those who had been there, for those who never left there.

The fruit of this fluidity of memory is the Necropolis, of raw language, which does not fall into the mercy of the car; an autobiographical book showing solidarity and resistance to this barbarism.

Pahor dies in the same city where he was born, leaving a work of over 40 books.