Writer Boris Pahor, survivor of Europe’s horrors, dies aged 108

Slovene author Boris Pahor, who lived through the oppression of Fascist Italy and the horrors of Nazi camps in a life dedicated to the defense of minorities, died on Monday at the age of 108, according to local media.

Pahor was hailed as a “witness and victim of the horrors caused by war, inflated nationalism, and totalitarian ideologies” by Italian President Sergio Mattarella.

Pahor was best-known for “Necropolis” (1967), an autobiographical novel written after a visit to a Nazi camp where he had been interred 20 years earlier.

Translated into several languages, it evoked the brutality and horror of what he witnessed in the camps and his guilt at surviving.

Italian Culture Minister Dario Franceschini hailed “a giant of the 20th century” who wrote about the dark periods of that time with “skill, lucidity and without pulling punches”.

Born on August 26, 1913, in what is now Italy’s northeastern coastal city of Trieste, Pahor was arrested by the Nazis in 1944 for his involvement with the anti-fascist Slovenian resistance.

He was imprisoned in five concentration camps, including Natzweiler-Struthof in Alsace, France, and Dachau and Bergen-Belsen in Germany.

Trieste was still part of the Austro-Hungarian empire when he was born, and it also had a sizable Slovenian community.