AVSENIK NABERGOJ, Irena. 2024. Testimony to the traumatic experience of the nazi camps in the autobiographical novel. AATSEEL 2024: conference program – abstracts. Las Vegas: AATSEEL, 103-104.

The paper presents the mode of literary presentation of the experiences in the concentration camps that Slovenian writer Boris Pahor (Trieste, 1913-2022) endured during the Second World War. He described his suffering in the Nazi camps Natzweiler-Struthof, Dachau, Dora, Harzungen and Bergen-Belsen, especially in his novel Necropolis (1967). Pahor said, he wrote the novel to relieve his interior and to acquaint his readers with all those people who died fighting for a liberated Europe. The novel Necropolis which has been translated into 18 languages is an artistically accomplished modern narrative dominated by an inner monologue. In it, Pahor depicts both the outward withering of his fellow prisoners and their fractured mental state. In particular, he examines himself in his constant struggle for survival, but also in his human concern for his suffering and sick fellow prisoners, which helps him endure the catastrophic reality of the camp. Unlike Nobel laureate Imre Kertesz (1929–2016), who in his autobiographical novel Fateless (1992) describes how he maintained an unyielding rationalism in the camps that enabled him to survive, Pahor, as a pacifist, establishes a deeply empathetic and compassionate relationship with his fellow prisoners. At several points in Necropolis, writer’s critical self-reflections can be traced, focusing on his concern for his own ethics under abnormal, tense circumstances. He repeatedly wonders if he could not have done more for his fellow prisoners. This leads to feelings of anxiety and guilt that he still feels many years later, despite his awareness of his own powerlessness. Pahor’s motif of man’s immediate coexistence with death is special, as is the writer’s doubt about the complete coherence between the former reality and its present manifestationin the imaginary space of the work of art. After liberation he turns his concern to the ethics of European society as a whole.

https://www.aatseel.org/100111/pdf/aatseel_2024_abstracts1.pdf