The video periodical Black Box was the first independent film production studio during the last years of communist rule in Hungary. It reported on demonstrations and civilian initiatives that the official media passed over in silence or reported on with disinformation. With its film reports, and portraits distributed in samizdat channels, at the beginning Black Box managed to create the largest film collection documenting the events of the transitional period and the change of political system both in Hungary and in other communist countries.

Comunismul românesc (Romanian Communism) is a series of national conferences organised annually in Bucharest each March since 2011. The conference series is a joint project of the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archive (CNSAS) and the Nicolae Iorga History Institute of the Romanian Academy, to which the Faculty of History at the University of Bucharest has also contributed since 2016. Its main purpose is to bring together scholars interested in the study of the communist regime in Romania in a regional and wider European context. The initiation of the conference series led to a closer collaboration between CNSAS and the Nicolae Iorga History Institute, which subsequently engaged in the project of digitising the publications related to the history of the Romanian Communist Party that are now part of the Online Collection at CNSAS. Over the years, participants at the conference have approached various aspects of the history of communism in Romania and East-Central Europe, ranging from repression, opposition, and propaganda to everyday life, memory, and post-communist nostalgia. Many of the papers, especially those dealing with repression and the role played by the Securitate, have been based on documents in the CNSAS Online Collection. More importantly, during this series of conferences, participants have made valuable suggestions regarding the types of documents that should be included in the online collection.

On the basis of the“Heiner-Müller-Archive / Transitraum” several exhibitions have already been realized. What is particularly remarkable, are the results of the student seminars, e.g. the exhibition: "Fürs Erste sind wir in der LPG" [For now, we are in the LPG (Agricultural Union of the GDR)], "50 Jahre Heiner Müller" "Die Umsiedlerin oder Das Leben auf dem Lande“ [The Resettlerd or Life in the Countryside]. They were shown at the Heiner-Müller-Archive from 20.10.2011 - 17.11.2011 and took place in cooperation with the foundation of the Academy of Arts (AdK). Also in cooperation with the AdK, Kristin Schulz produced an exhibition, along with the recollections of selected eye-witnesses called: “Ich hätte gern, daß Freunde mich besuchten / Statt des Beamten, der die Steuer eintreibt“[I would prefer friends come visit me / Instead of the public officer collecting taxes]. The "Transitraum" accommodated the exhibition from October 23 to December 18, 2015. In March 2016, the “Internationale Heiner-Müller-Gesellschaft” conducted a “Heiner-Müller-Festival” in The Berlin theatre "Hebbel am Ufer" (HAU). At this event, Kristin Schulz presented the “Heiner Müller-Archiv / Transitraum” under the title "Transitraum goes HAU" as an extravagant temporary exhibition,  showing Heiner Müller's relationship to his books.

The greatest event in the history of the Éva Cseke-Gyimesi Collection was the donation to BCU Cluj-Napoca. The book donation handed over in June 2011 was processed in 2012–2013 by the library of the Institute of Hungarian Literature which is a subsidiary of the Central University Library. The latter is part of the Library of the Faculty of Letters Branch – Section Hungarian Department, which is located on the first floor, in wing A of the Faculty of Letters, and has served the Departments of Hungarian Language and General Linguistics, Hungarian Literature, and Hungarian Ethnography and Anthropology since 1990. The evolution of the book stock of this section of the library of the Faculty of Letters was influenced by the administrative and legal transformations of the departments with Hungarian as the language of teaching. The first inventory register of the library contains the titles of publications acquired in the period between 1902 and 1912. The majority of publications featured in this library come from donations made by various teaching staff members and personalities, but there are also publications bought from private libraries. Thus, in 1941 the private collections of Elemér Császár and Gyula Baross were acquired, both renowned Hungarian literary critics. Consequently, the book stock of this library was enriched by a number of 8,308 volumes, giving a total by the end of 1941 of as many as 12,000. At present this fond constitutes the old stock of the library. Similarly, a part of the book stock of the Hungarian Civic Circle of Sibiu, dissolved in 1944, can be found in this library and at the Romanian-Hungarian section. The library contains 14,812 volumes and 175 titles of periodicals, in addition to the 12,000 volumes in the old stock. Apart from the Gyimesi Éva collection, it is home also to the Zoltán Szabó collection which features 900 books and 25 periodicals (Library of the Faculty of Letters Branch – Section Hungarian Department 2018).

The registration of volumes of the collection donated was carried out under the label Fond Gyimesi Éva. Moreover, the book legacy bearing the sign “Cs. Gyimesi Éva Könyvespolca” (Cs. Gyimesi Éva Bookshelf) was displayed in a visible place in the library hall. The documents, amounting to three boxes, were donated in August 2013 and have not been processed yet. The family have not placed any restrictions on research and have not classified the documents as confidential. It is planned to resort to group work involving students to process this material. These efforts imply the setting up of an inventory list that will allow public access as well so that this part of collection can become available for scholarly research.

In 2011, the Madona Museum of Local History and Art organized the exhibition ‘Elza Rudenāja - 100’, which paid tribute to the creator and first director of the museum. Photographs from this exhibition and an introductory text are displayed on the site of the museum: http://www.madonasmuzejs.lv/par-muzeju/elza-ruden%C4%81ja/elzai-ruden%C4%81jai---100

In the autumn 2011, veteran legionnaire and military historian Dr. Tibor Szecskó was the first to return his questionnaire of 50 questions, covering his whole life career. As the main organizer of the Hungarian veterans’ circle in Provence, he was the also one who managed to get many of his comrades involved in their shared memory research work (questionnaires, oral history interviews, memoirs, film shootings, archival research at the Headquarters of the French Foreign Legion in Aubagne, etc.)

He was born in 1939 in the rural town of Gyöngyös, Hungary, as the third and youngest child of a working-class family. His father was a mason working for a state farm. As a second-year student of a vocational school in the autumn of 1956, he took part enthusiastically in local events of the revolution. Together with a friend, they then hitched a ride with a lorry and travelled to Budapest, where they joined the largest group of insurgents at Corvin-köz, and took part in the battles in several parts of the city. In late November, without saying goodbye to his family, he escaped to Austria with other teenage boys. For a few weeks he stayed in the Eisenstadt refugee camp, then he was transported to France and given the status of “réfugier politique.”

As soon as he arrived in the city of Rouen, he signed up at the Legion’s recruitment office, but being only 16 years old, he was rejected. For two years he shared all the misery of the tramps in Lille and Paris, sleeping in the “Draft Hotel” (Hôtel de Curant Air) under bridges, living off of aid for refugees and poorly paid, sporadic work. Hunger and misery pushed him to try his fortune again with the Legion in the autumn of 1958, this time with much success. He was shipped as an 18-year-old recruit from Marseille to Oran, and soon found himself on the military training base of Saida. Another two years passed, and he was promoted to sergeant at the age of 20, and became the training warrant of hundreds of young Hungarian recruits arriving at that time in North Africa. Afterward, as a warrant of the 3^rd Infantry Regiment, he also took part in the offensives in the Sahara and Madagascar, was injured twice, and then was commanded to the 1st Cavalry (Warship) Regiment.

After the Algerian war ended in 1962, the main base of the Legion was moved from Sidi-bel-Abbes to the town of Aubagne, South of France, and Szecskó held his new post here at the Headquarters of the Legion. In the 1970s and 1980s, he became the Director of the Museum and the Archives of the French Foreign Legion, and edited its monthly magazine Képi blanc. In the meantime, he received his MA and then PhD degree in history from the University of Montpelier. He finished his military career in 1986 after close to 29 years of service in the Legion; however, he kept active in his field of science and in organizing circles of veteran legionnaires (AALE). He published a number of articles and a dozen books on the history of French Foreign Legion in French, English, and German.

Before 1990, based on rumors fostered by the communist secret police, he, together with his fellow patriots, thought for decades that all active legionnaires had been deprived of their Hungarian citizenship. He became a French citizen in 1974, and lived together with his Spanish-French wife, children, and grandchildren in Aix-en-Provence for half a century. Among his many prizes and decorations, he was most proud of the “Knight of Arts and Literature,” a prestigious French prize established for civilians, that no active military man ever received, except him. Though he felt all through his life a strong homesickness, and managed to preserve his traditional Hungarian patriotism, he never had the chance to return to Hungary after 1956—for a long time due to his political anathema, and then his poor state of health. He passed in Aix-en-Provence in late 2017 following years of struggle with his fatal illness. His parting was not only a painful loss to his family but also to his friends and the Hungarian circle of veteran legionnaires in Provence, of which he had been a devoted organizer for decades.

His straightforward, and emotive answers to his questionnaire lay bare his life career and frame of mind. He also reflected on his feelings toward his native land, the Legion, and his host country. Though his loyalty to the former two seems to remain firm, similarly to his stubborn anticommunism rooted in his early life experience of 1956, he felt much more reserved and often critical of the French public affairs and way of life, as both are lacking  “the real” patriotic loyalty and altruism. Thus, keeping alive the regular meetings and traditional community rituals, with their strong 1956 engagement, served to strengthen the Hungarian legionnaires’ moral and cultural resistance.

List of completed veteran questionnaires, 2011–2017

(Place and date of birth, residence in France, and year of completion)

  1. A., Domokos (Budapest, 1939) Paris, 2012

  2. Bubla, István Miklós (Keszthely, 1936) Paulhan, 2017

  3. Huber, Béla (Sopron, 1942) Aubagne, 2012

  4. Spátay, János (Budapest, 1943) Puyloubier, 2011

  5. Soós, Sándor (Budapest, 1939) Septémes les Vallons, 2012

  6. Sorbán, Gyula Elek (Budapest, 1940) Toulon, 2011

  7. Szecskó, Tibor (Gyöngyös, 1939) Aix-en-Provence 2017, 2011

  8. Morvay, Tamás (Budapest, 1938) Vins sur Caramy, 2012

  9. Nemes, Sándor (Szekszárd-Zomba, 1941) Borgo (Corsica), 2011

On the basis of the materials to be found in the oral history archive of the Sighet Memorial, a second audiobook was launched in 2011 under the title Rusaliile Negre: Deportarea în Bărăgan (Black Whitsunday: Deportation to the Bărăgan). The occasion for the launch of the audiobook was the sixtieth anniversary of the massive deportations from the west of Romania, from the border with Yugoslavia, to the Bărăgan, a vast plain in the south of the country, which at that time was almost completely uninhabited, a veritable Siberia in its isolation from the rest of the country and its minimal population density. The title alludes to the fact that this event took place on 17–18 June 1951, on the very day of the feast of Pentecost (Whitsunday), the seventh Sunday after Easter calculated according to the method used by the Orthodox Church. This multimedia document includes twenty extracts from seventeen interviews in the oral history archive of the International Centre for Studies into Communism, part of the Memorial to the Victims of Communism and to the Resistance. The editing was the work of Andreea Cârstea and the musical illustration is by Grigore Leşe. The audiobook was created as part of the project “Memory of the Romanian Deportations,” financed through the European Commission’s programme “Europe for Citizens: European Remembrance.”

Romulus Rusan, who coordinated this project, describes thus the drama experienced by those deported without guilt, without any prior notice, without the possibility of escaping the consequences of this arbitrary action, which targeted all those of whom it was suspected that they might have sympathised with the policies of the communist leader in neighbouring Yugoslavia, Iosip Broz Tito, who was already in open conflict with the leader of the Soviet Union, Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin: “The deportations from the Banat and Mehedinţi in the summer of 1951  were one (the most bestial) of the numerous projects of social purging invented by the communist regime in the Gheorghiu-Dej period, at the height of Soviet domination. Following a plan prepared over three months with diabolical precision, during the night of 17–18 July over 44,000 people were removed from their homes without any prior notice, starting with women and men fit for work and continuing with their families, comprising elderly people up to eighty-five years of age and children of all ages (one of them born just two days before). After a long-drawn-out journey of two weeks, locked in livestock wagons, the deportees were unloaded in a number of railway stations in the Bărăgan, from where trucks carried them to eighteen different points in the deserted steppe. Left to their own devices in the open, under the burning summer sun, they first had to make underground huts, as in a primitive village. In the years that followed they built themselves more presentable houses and brought the virgin soil under cultivation. They thus managed to obtain food for themselves and for their farm animals, overcoming poverty and isolation, surviving like so many Robinson Crusoes of the twentieth century.” The grandparents of one of the authors of the present text were among those hurriedly deported on that dark Whitsunday night, from a village near Timişoara, where they had settled after fleeing from Bessarabia. Leaving behind their house and their belongings for the second time, they were forcible moved to the middle of the Bărăgan, where they arrived with what they had been able to pack quickly and carry with them, where they were given nothing but a door and two windows, so they could make themselves a house of mud and reeds before the coming of winter, where they were forced to reorganise their entire existence in the middle of a deserted plain with almost no sources of water. Their children escaped deportation only because at that moment they were at university in Bucharest. So as not to share the fate of their parents, they falsified their birth certificates, changing their name and Bessarabian place of origin, which had been one of the reasons for the inclusion of their parents in the list of deportees. Romanians from Bessarabia who had taken refuge in Romania at the end of the war to escape the Soviet regime and were implicitly considered by the communist regime in Romania to be anti-Stalinists and potential Titoists, constituted the second largest group among the categories deported to the Bărăgan in June 1951.

The exhibition “Black Whitsunday: The Deportations to the Bărăgan” was first opened at the Dimitrie Gusti National Village Museum, which hosted it in the period 25 March to 25 April 2011. The exhibition then travelled to Timișoara, Drobeta Turnu Severin, Sighet, Sibiu, Berlin, Sindelfingen, Munich, Augsburg, Tübingen, Budapest, and Cluj, before returning to Bucharest, to the Sighet Memorial’s Pemanent Exhibition Space in the Romanian capital. The exhibition’s twenty-eight panels presented themes relating to the forced removal from the Banat of all those who were suspected for various reasons of being adepts of Iosip Broz Tito. The panels relect the following themes: the international context of the Stalin–Tito split, the elaboration of the so-called “dislocation” plan, the compilation of “black lists,” the deportations to the Bărăgan, aspects of daily life in the new settlements – building houses, obtaining water and food, school, work in the fields, funerals – and the use of the area as a place to send released political prisoners into so-called “forced domicile.” The explanatory texts, complemented by hundreds of photographs, maps, and objects, are based on the personal testimonies of those directly involved, recorded and archived by the Civic Academy Foundation. The opening of the exhibition was also the occasion for the launch of an audio-book containing extracts from the recollections preserved in the Oral History Archive of the International Centre for Studies into Communism. The exhibition was part of the project “The Memory of the Romanian Deportations,” financed by the European Commission through the programme “Europe for Citizens: Active Memory of Europe.”