He was born as a child of the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy and now died as an Italian citizen.

More than 108 years passed in between, during which Boris Pahor became a contemporary witness who made literature of the horrors of the twentieth century that he himself suffered: in the Slovenian language.

That should have been taken away from him when his hometown of Trieste fell to Italy under the Treaty of Trianon in 1920 and then a ruthless policy of Italianisation began, which hit the members of the much larger Slovene minority even more than the German-speaking residents, because they had hoped that Trieste would come to the newly created Kingdom of Yugoslavia.

Italian nationalists then set fire to the Slovenian cultural center and Boris Pahor, who saw it as a six-year-old,

remembered the sight for the rest of his life.

When he then began to read Dostoyevsky as a teenager, he made the resolution, as he told the FAZ in 2014, from now on to always write for the humiliated and offended.

He has stayed true to him.

Andrew Plathaus

Responsible editor for literature and literary life.

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Pahor became an Italian soldier and translator when Mussolini's troops invaded Slovenia in 1941.

There concentration camps were set up to break the resistance against the occupiers.

In 1943, Pahor joined this resistance when it came down to the Germans after Mussolini's fall.

But he was captured and dragged through several German concentration camps: to Dachau, Natzweiler-Struthof, Dora-Mittelbau and Bergen-Belsen, where he was liberated in 1945.

Although he went through some of the worst Nazi camps, after 1945 his anger was directed more towards the Italians, among whom he missed any attempt to commemorate his own crimes.

When the novel "Nekropol" was published in Slovenian in 1967, for which Pahor drew on his experiences, it was to take thirty years

until it was translated into Italian.

However, German publishers took a little more time: until 2001.

Pahor was almost ninety at the time, but now his literature had a great international impact.

By the last of his books (published in 2012, at the age of 98!), fourteen novels, five volumes of short stories and eight volumes of essays had been published;

At least a dozen of them were translated into German.

The honors never stopped: French Legion of Honor, Austrian Cross of Honor, Italian Order of Merit, Slovenian Order of Merit.

In 2008, however, Pahor refused an honor from the mayor of Trieste because the justification did not mention Italian war crimes.

He still lived in his beloved city, and that's where he died: this Monday at the age of 108.