COURAGE

connecting collections

The collection testifies to the thirty-six-year activity of Croatian journalist and writer Jakša Kušan (1931), who propagated the idea of a democratic, pluralistic and free Croatia in exile from 1955 to 1990. By editing and publishing the non-partisan magazine Nova Hrvatska, he tried to inform the Croatian and global public about the suppression of human rights and civil liberties in socialist Croatia and Yugoslavia.

 The Jan Hus Educational Foundation's collection presents an extraordinary set of materials documenting a work of a British organization focusing on supporting of cultural opposition in Czechoslovakia, mainly through underground university, scholarships, and the publication and translation of forbidden or unaccessable books.  

The collection is important proof of the activities of a left-thinking historian, a "spiritual father" and co-founder of the Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Prosecuted (VONS), a co-publisher of unofficial periodic Dialogy, who was imprisoned several times and forced to go to exile, where he collaborated with dissidents from other socialist countries.  

The collection of Jan Trefulka documents the transformation of a prominent writer and an engaged Communist into a dissident, a signatory of the Charter 77 publishing in samizdat and exile periodicals. The collection contains Jan Trefulka's personal materials, documents related to his samizdat activities, literary works and editorial work in a periodical Host do domu.