Boris Pahor, a testimony of the resistance against fascism

It is difficult to explain who Boris Pahor has been.

It is difficult to understand the position he has occupied, whatever the perspective from which we try to approach him.

He was born shortly before the First World War in Trieste and died in the same city on May 30;

in August he would have been 109 years old.

But it is not his longevity that makes him such an exceptional witness, but his look, a mixture of tenderness and resistance.

He never turned his eyes away from the harshest truths and he never lost the naive joy of a child who simply enjoys being a part of the world.

In one of our conversations he told me about his mother.

She said that she had a stubborn character, she was immovable and stubborn.

Boris Pahor inherited that proverbial karst stubbornness, perhaps that is a plausible explanation to understand why he was able to be a mischievous child in the streets of fascist Trieste, because he returned from his "pilgrimage among the shadows" -as they translated the title into French of his novel

(1967) which testifies to his internment in the Nazi concentration camps— with an irrepressible desire to continue fighting, because after the war he resisted all kinds of pressure, he wrote and edited publications in his Triestina diaspora.

While Slovenia was hidden and unnoticed behind the Iron Curtain, Boris Pahor barely had a readership even among Slovenians.

For decades his testimony could not be disclosed because the whole of Europe was not willing to listen to that complexity that he has been drawing in his work, but neither was his civic commitment.

Pahor testified, but always questioned, doubted and inquired anew even in his own writings.

There are stories that he rewrote two and three times, at intervals of years, without ever getting tired of analyzing himself and those around him.

In 1920, he witnessed the burning by fascists of the

, an imposing building located in the center of Trieste, built by the architect Maks Fabiani, which housed a hotel, a theater for four hundred people, a gym, a library, a music school, two restaurants and a cafe, a savings bank and a printing press, as well as private flats and offices.

The building, which was a symbol of a confidence in the progress with which the Slovenians then imagined the future, was set on fire by the blackshirt squads that were beginning to organize.

Fabiani, the architect, who had stood out among the creators of the monumental Vienna, ended up developing projects for the fascist state, bringing that same grandiloquence to rural spaces.

This example brings us closer to the complexity of that environment where Central Europe converges in which the Germans wanted to imprint their hegemony with the Latin Mediterranean and the Balkans, the lands where proclamations resounded in favor of pan-Slavism, but which were and are a gateway from the Ottoman incursions and from so many other distant countries.

On June 13, 2020, one hundred years after the event described in

(1959; rewritten in 1972), the heads of the two states, Italy and Slovenia met in Trieste in the presence of the author to close one of many wounds. .

It should not surprise us either that Pahor was betrayed to the Gestapo by a Slovenian collaborator, they were the ones who best knew who in the community stood out in the anti-fascist struggle.

When he came back after a long recovery—which he described in

(four rewrites 1958, 1961, 1978, 1998) - was the protagonist of one of the most decisive debates that prepared Slovenia for a more plural and more democratic future.

He published in Trieste an interview that cost Edvard Kocbek an ostracism for life and Pahor a few years' ban on entering Yugoslavia.

What were they talking about?

Of the massacres that took place in Slovenia just after the war in retaliation against young people who had enlisted in anti-communist militias.

Pahor, who because of an informer was sent to Dachau, transferred to Natzweiler-Struthof, then again to Dachau and then to Harzungen and finally to Bergen-Belsen, demanded that under no circumstances can any state act on such revengeful impulses.

His

was translated into French in 1990, in 1995 into English and in 1997 into Italian —in a modest publishing house in Monfalcone—, in 2001 into German, and in 2004 my Catalan translation was published —in Lleida because the big publishers still didn't know who era— and in 2010 the Spanish translation by Barbara Pregelj.

In addition, one of his stories, which narrates the return home, is available in the anthology published by Páginas de Espuma in 2009. In that book, he is accompanied by Kocbek and another master of complexity, Lojze Kovačič.

The three are pillars of a small culture, the Slovenian, but their message must be shared: there are no borders, there is only one humanity.

Simona Skrabec is a translator into Catalan and Spanish for Boris Pahor.

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