Boris Pahor: We have to talk to young people to win fascism
Boris Pahor: We have to talk to young people to win fascism
Boris Pahor, the Slovenian writer from Trieste, is 98 years old (he was born on 28 August 1913). His most famous work is the Necropolis, an autobiographical novel about his imprisonment in Natzweiler-Struthof that made him known throughout the world. He is relentless despite his age, in these days is around schools telling the Liberation of Italy, April 25. He never says no. For him to talk to young people is essential, "because they want to erase the memory," he says. When the mayor of Trieste, Roberto Dipiazza (PDL), offered him honorary citizenship, Pahor has declined, preferring the prize by the association "Free and Equal."
- Let's start from here. Because have you refused the prize of the mayor?
They told me that the text of the homage spoke of my suffering in German concentration camps. I wrote to the mayor thanking him and adding that my life has been marked not only by the German concentration camp. Because before that my youth was dramatically marked by fascism. I lost a lot of years of my life because the Slovene language was banned and I failed the transition from Slovenian primary school to the Italian schools. And not because I was not able from an intellectual point of view, but because I could not become Italian by force. The regime wanted to prove that the entire population was Italian. They changed names and surnames of the people, making us disappear. In short, I told the mayor: "I warn you before because I do not want you to give me a prize without mentioning fascism. Otherwise I would refuse." That's it.
- When you finally entered the Italian school what happened?
I have been considered a failed student and they sent me to a seminar hoping that someone would take care of me. Going back to the awards, it is clear that here in Italy in these years fascism is best left aside. Better not talk about it, right? But for me, fascism means the ruin of my youth. Take the home of Slovenian culture. Now there is a center of translators and interpreters. But the marble slab - put up in 1920 - does not say that the fascists set it on fire, it says it was the Nationalists. The first right-wing dictatorship in Europe was born in Italy, and furthermore I add, it was born in Trieste. Mussolini has prepared his rise to power in '22.
- And here fascism sought to annihilate the Slovenian community.
Sure. They burned our buildings. They have robbed our libraries, our books have been thrown out of libraries. They even made a big pile of books in front of the Slovenian monument to Verdi, the symbol of Italianess, as they used to say. They treated us as ignorant, for them we were a people without culture. "Bugs" even wrote a newspaper, the bugs that have invaded the neighborhood. Because we were told to be the people coming from outside to occupy the italian Trieste, but they are all lies, because we have been here for twelve centuries. Now the truth is surfacing. One of the buildings burnt by fascism was the theater where Ibsen was staged, where European plays were staged. The Slovenes in Trieste in '18 were more numerous than in Ljubljana, we were not ignorant. I was born in the ghetto of Trieste.
- Let's go back to your youth
As I said, it's been my ruin. It's not that I have physically tortured, beaten. At school you had to know Italian to do your homework. And how could I work on them if I had no preparation? My dad was photographer of the gendarmerie, and during the Austrian period had managed to speak German, but he was from Trieste, spoke in dialect. So at school I was a failure: he had to pay the teacher for me to pass into the next class. After that it was another failure: I did a two-year business because he was a traveling salesman. He got that from my grandfather, his father, a resale of butter, cheese, yeast, and wanted me to study because they did not want that I end up a seller in the winter, with the wind blowing at ninety, one hundred kilometers. But the first year was insufficient, and I had to repeat it. The second year was worse than the first. It was not that I became stupid. But I could not force myself to write about Mazzini, Garibaldi, this whole history that was foreign to me. The older kids had told me that you had to force yourself to be Italian if you wanted to be part of regular school, we had to become Italian as much as needed to write homework and studying history, but we had to preserve our identity, to remain faithful to ourselves. We had to do it secretly, illegally, had to try to find the books and it was not easy to find books, there were not Slovenian libraries. The books had come from across the border, such as tobacco. Today we have Slovenian schools here in Friuli. But those twenty-five years were years of Fascism and thorough cleaning. But this our past is silenced, they don't want to talk about it.
- E after the seminary?
Just out of seminary I had to go to the military. It's a lie when they say I had gone voluntarily to Libya. I could not go to Libya, but I could not avoid the military. Unless I had decided to desert. But I wanted to take a degree. First I had to redo the secondary school exam. So I agreed to do the military service, I was 27. True, there was a possibility by paying a marshal, to go to an Italian city instead of Libya. But I preferred to go to Libya, rather than continue to be in this situation, in this country that was rejecting me. Of course we ended up fighting, because the war broke out. I returned to Italy in January 1941. Then I proposed myself as an interpreter of serbo-croatian. They sent me to Lake Garda. Then September 8 arrived, and we all run away. The Germans were pillaging and I went to Trieste, where there was already the German police. And already the resistance had begun.
- And you were arrested
I was arrested by the Gestapo Slovenian collaborators. I have sent into the concentration camp at Dachau, then to Alsace and then in the camp I described in my book "Necropolis", Natzweiler-Struthof. I was an interpreter. In the concentration camp they were all dying. I was afraid that they would forced me to speak, to give names, getting information with torture. At Dachau, then I became a nurse. I was with the dead. Before I was with the sick, and there you learn that when you are in a horizontal position you have no more hope to go out of there on your feet. You went out on a stretcher to go in the oven. We were liberated on April 15, 1945. I had a cave in my right lung. The British did not expect to see that sea of dead and dying people. When a serious illness struck you, you were not hungry anymore. And that was the moment when you knew that things were getting serious. I decided to go. On foot and by hitchhiking from Bergen Belsen concentration camp in Holland. In that camp they sent all that was destroyed human body, destined to die. It was sent out to have the other camps dormitories free. You did not received a shot in the neck, like it happened when you were marching in the fields. One had to travel unti one did not die, he had to travel, loaded and unloaded like a sack. The difference between political people camps and the camps where Jews ended up was this. We ended up in ashes as well, but until you had a breath you had to work.
Born in Trieste in 1913, Pahor has experienced discrimination and persecution against the Slovenian citizenship since the years following the First World War. Active in the anti-fascist resistance, he was arrested and deported to Nazi concentration camps, an experience that marked his work in depth and in the book "Necropolis" has found the highest expression. He is the author of several novels, translated into several languages. Pahor was awarded the most prestigious international awards for his work.
- Let's start from here. Because have you refused the prize of the mayor?
They told me that the text of the homage spoke of my suffering in German concentration camps. I wrote to the mayor thanking him and adding that my life has been marked not only by the German concentration camp. Because before that my youth was dramatically marked by fascism. I lost a lot of years of my life because the Slovene language was banned and I failed the transition from Slovenian primary school to the Italian schools. And not because I was not able from an intellectual point of view, but because I could not become Italian by force. The regime wanted to prove that the entire population was Italian. They changed names and surnames of the people, making us disappear. In short, I told the mayor: "I warn you before because I do not want you to give me a prize without mentioning fascism. Otherwise I would refuse." That's it.
- When you finally entered the Italian school what happened?
I have been considered a failed student and they sent me to a seminar hoping that someone would take care of me. Going back to the awards, it is clear that here in Italy in these years fascism is best left aside. Better not talk about it, right? But for me, fascism means the ruin of my youth. Take the home of Slovenian culture. Now there is a center of translators and interpreters. But the marble slab - put up in 1920 - does not say that the fascists set it on fire, it says it was the Nationalists. The first right-wing dictatorship in Europe was born in Italy, and furthermore I add, it was born in Trieste. Mussolini has prepared his rise to power in '22.
- And here fascism sought to annihilate the Slovenian community.
Sure. They burned our buildings. They have robbed our libraries, our books have been thrown out of libraries. They even made a big pile of books in front of the Slovenian monument to Verdi, the symbol of Italianess, as they used to say. They treated us as ignorant, for them we were a people without culture. "Bugs" even wrote a newspaper, the bugs that have invaded the neighborhood. Because we were told to be the people coming from outside to occupy the italian Trieste, but they are all lies, because we have been here for twelve centuries. Now the truth is surfacing. One of the buildings burnt by fascism was the theater where Ibsen was staged, where European plays were staged. The Slovenes in Trieste in '18 were more numerous than in Ljubljana, we were not ignorant. I was born in the ghetto of Trieste.
- Let's go back to your youth
As I said, it's been my ruin. It's not that I have physically tortured, beaten. At school you had to know Italian to do your homework. And how could I work on them if I had no preparation? My dad was photographer of the gendarmerie, and during the Austrian period had managed to speak German, but he was from Trieste, spoke in dialect. So at school I was a failure: he had to pay the teacher for me to pass into the next class. After that it was another failure: I did a two-year business because he was a traveling salesman. He got that from my grandfather, his father, a resale of butter, cheese, yeast, and wanted me to study because they did not want that I end up a seller in the winter, with the wind blowing at ninety, one hundred kilometers. But the first year was insufficient, and I had to repeat it. The second year was worse than the first. It was not that I became stupid. But I could not force myself to write about Mazzini, Garibaldi, this whole history that was foreign to me. The older kids had told me that you had to force yourself to be Italian if you wanted to be part of regular school, we had to become Italian as much as needed to write homework and studying history, but we had to preserve our identity, to remain faithful to ourselves. We had to do it secretly, illegally, had to try to find the books and it was not easy to find books, there were not Slovenian libraries. The books had come from across the border, such as tobacco. Today we have Slovenian schools here in Friuli. But those twenty-five years were years of Fascism and thorough cleaning. But this our past is silenced, they don't want to talk about it.
- E after the seminary?
Just out of seminary I had to go to the military. It's a lie when they say I had gone voluntarily to Libya. I could not go to Libya, but I could not avoid the military. Unless I had decided to desert. But I wanted to take a degree. First I had to redo the secondary school exam. So I agreed to do the military service, I was 27. True, there was a possibility by paying a marshal, to go to an Italian city instead of Libya. But I preferred to go to Libya, rather than continue to be in this situation, in this country that was rejecting me. Of course we ended up fighting, because the war broke out. I returned to Italy in January 1941. Then I proposed myself as an interpreter of serbo-croatian. They sent me to Lake Garda. Then September 8 arrived, and we all run away. The Germans were pillaging and I went to Trieste, where there was already the German police. And already the resistance had begun.
- And you were arrested
I was arrested by the Gestapo Slovenian collaborators. I have sent into the concentration camp at Dachau, then to Alsace and then in the camp I described in my book "Necropolis", Natzweiler-Struthof. I was an interpreter. In the concentration camp they were all dying. I was afraid that they would forced me to speak, to give names, getting information with torture. At Dachau, then I became a nurse. I was with the dead. Before I was with the sick, and there you learn that when you are in a horizontal position you have no more hope to go out of there on your feet. You went out on a stretcher to go in the oven. We were liberated on April 15, 1945. I had a cave in my right lung. The British did not expect to see that sea of dead and dying people. When a serious illness struck you, you were not hungry anymore. And that was the moment when you knew that things were getting serious. I decided to go. On foot and by hitchhiking from Bergen Belsen concentration camp in Holland. In that camp they sent all that was destroyed human body, destined to die. It was sent out to have the other camps dormitories free. You did not received a shot in the neck, like it happened when you were marching in the fields. One had to travel unti one did not die, he had to travel, loaded and unloaded like a sack. The difference between political people camps and the camps where Jews ended up was this. We ended up in ashes as well, but until you had a breath you had to work.
Born in Trieste in 1913, Pahor has experienced discrimination and persecution against the Slovenian citizenship since the years following the First World War. Active in the anti-fascist resistance, he was arrested and deported to Nazi concentration camps, an experience that marked his work in depth and in the book "Necropolis" has found the highest expression. He is the author of several novels, translated into several languages. Pahor was awarded the most prestigious international awards for his work.
