ROME: Slovene author Boris Pahor, who suffered the oppression of a fascist Italian state and the horror of Nazi camps in Germany during World War II, died at the age of 108 on Sunday.

In a life dedicated to the defence of minorities, Italian President Sergio Mattarella hailed Pahor as a “witness and victim of the horrors caused by war, by inflated nationalism and totalitarian ideologies”.

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

He was held at five concentration camps, including Natzweiler-Struthof in France’s Alsace region and Dachau and Bergen-Belsen in Germany.

When he was born, Trieste was still part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and also home to a significant Slovenian community.

Published in Dawn, May 31st, 2022