Boris Pahor - Resistance Fight and Imprisonment

Resistance Fight and Imprisonment

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 would describe these crucial weeks of his life in the novel Mesto v zalivu ("The City in 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.

On 21 January 1944, he was captured by the Slovene Home Guard that handed him over to the Nazis who first imprisoned him in the Coroneo jail in Trieste and then (on 28 February 1944) sent him to Dachau. From there he was transported to Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines (Markirch) and Natzweiler-Struthof in Alsace, then again 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 of Pahor's work, frequently compared to that of Primo Levi, Imre Kertesz, or Jorge Semprún. Outside Slovenia, his best-known work is probably Nekropola (Pilgrim Among the Shadows), a novel in which he remembers the internment while walking through Natzweiler-Struthof as a visitor, analysing with intensive scrutiny the human relations in the camps.

Between April 1945 and December 1946, he recovered at the French sanatorium at Villers-sur-Marne (Île-de-France).