COURAGE

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Kalle Istvan Eller studied Estonian and English philology at the University of Tartu, but never graduated. He was active in the almanac movement, publishing poetry and essays in manuscript magazines, and as an editor. From 1973, he worked as a forester. He is currently actively engaged in maintaining the Võro language, which is a minor language spoken in southeast Estonia. He is also an activist and leader of the Estonian native neo-pagan faith, and a member of the Estonian Defence League. In 2001, a collection of his poetry written during the Soviet era was published.

Elza Rudenāja (1911-1998) was born in the Madona district. She was a graduate of the University of Latvia, where she studied history and developed an interest in archaeology. After graduating, she also gained some experience in museum work. In the summer of 1944, she approached the first secretary of the Madona district Communist Party Committee with a proposal to organise a local history museum in Madona, and received support for the proposal. The museum was established in September 1944, and Rudenāja was its director until 1990, when she was forced to resign due to ill health. Although the attitude of the local authorities towards the museum from the 1940s to the 1960s was very often not supportive, Rudenāja managed to create one of the best local museums in Latvia. She was never a Communist Party member, which was rather rare for directors of museums, and she employed several people who were persecuted by the Soviet authorities for political reasons. Nevertheless, despite occasional attacks against the museum, Rudenāja managed to retain her post, which was largely due to her sociability, and her wide range of supporters and friends in cultural milieus, some of whom were respected by the authorities. The situation became easier in the 1970s, when Rudenāja established a reputation for herself as an important personality in the field of culture. Rudenāja's main interests in local history were in archaeology and pre-Soviet history in general. She was also genuinely interested in and devoted to literature and art. Thus, the preservation of the historical and cultural legacy, participation in the establishment and running of memorial museums to personalities who were important to the national culture, became the focus of her efforts. Apart from overseeing the collecting work and holding of artefacts, Rudenāja devoted a lot of energy to dissemination and educational activities. Although she never tried to challenge the Soviet regime openly, she often had to balance between the ideological demands of the local and republican authorities and supporting the national culture.

Judit Ember (1935–2007) was an independent film director, founding staff member of Black Box video periodical, and director of many taboo-breaking and banned documentary films during communist rule in Hungary

She was born in the village of Abádszalók and brought up in an assimilated Hungarian Jewish family. Her father was a lawyer, who was killed in Auschwitz. The rest of the family managed to survive the Holocaust and avoided being deported to the extermination camp through a fortuitous chance.

She studied Hungarian language and literature and history at Loránd Eötvös University, Budapest, then continued her studies at the College of Theater and Film Arts, where in 1968 she received a film director degree. She started her professional career at the Popular, Scientific, and Educational Film Studio, MAFILM, then from the 1970s she worked for Hungarian Television and the Béla Balázs Studio (BBS). As a filmmaker, she belonged to the trend of “situative documentarism,” a new genre that some young and talented artists cultivated at BBS, the essence of which was to explore or reconstruct a real-life situation by exploring the historical and sociological roots of the course of events.

Ember, with her mind and attitude, was a real independent filmmaker right from her earliest works. She preferred to choose topics that the official media neglected or misrepresented, or did not even dare to touch. As she said: “What is at stake here are the traumatic experiences of a whole society, which accumulated, stockpiled, and were never discussed publicly. It is a society which contains not a single group or layer that did not suffer from injustice and prejudice in the 20^th century, nor from being hit, humiliated, persecuted, expulsed, or even killed.”

In Hungarian film history she remains the director with the record number of banned movies, such masterly works as “Stage” (1968), The Resolution (1972), “Case Study” (1976), Pócspetri (1982), and “Let Kutrucz Talk” (1985). Critics consider most of her films to be both artistic and social scientific case studies. Her special style, original method in dramaturgy, and exciting inquiries are the main characteristics of her works, together with much empathy and a genuine talent in bringing out the feelings and thoughts of her everyday characters. It is a small wonder that she became one of the founding members of Black Box.

She felt it her moral duty to give voice those who were never asked to speak or did not have a chance to express their views. She had a special talent in bringing out difficult testimonies of her amateur characters, with a sensitive reception towards their experiences and autobiographical stories. With her empathy and psychological knowledge, she perfectly knew that without letting the patient talk there is no recovery. However, apart from empathy, something else was also needed for Ember to give voice to her characters, those peasants deprived of their small lands, and who were then frozen in fear and shame for the rest of their life, or the intellectuals who spent years in prison and were well aware of the risk of speaking publicly about the regime’s crimes. This extra factor was simply Ember’s human quality, her confidence, tactful and patient presence, expressing silently that she trusts in the speaker’s rightful cause, and thus managed to persuade everybody that it was well worth it to talk freely about those painful events after thirty years’ silence.

Éva Vass, a film preservationist at the Hungarian Film Archives, remembers Judit Ember as someone who did not seek the absolute truth, but rather preferred to reconstruct events from the viewpoints of everyday people. “Her method always follows the uncertain trail of the exploration of reality, as she drags her spectators into the story, and after a while they feel as if they were also being questioned, becoming participants of those real-life events too. And what is most fascinating in her films is the depth of this presentation.”

Ferenc Erdei (1910–1971) was a Hungarian sociologist and politician and a member of the “people’s writers’ movement.” Erdei was born in Makó to a peasant family, which grew onions. He studied law at Szeged University. He was a member of the Independent Kossuth Party in Makó and a leading figure in the March Front. Erdei was one of the founders of the National Peasants’ Party in 1939. In October and November 1944, he participated in the Independence Front in Szeged. In December 1944, he became a member of the Provisional National Assembly, and from December 1944 to November 1945, he was Minister of Interior in the Provisional National Government. He was elected vice-chairman of the National Peasants’ Party in 1945 and general secretary in February 1947. From September 1948 to June 1949, he was state minister. He the worked as minister of agriculture until July 1953, then as justice minister until October 1954, and as minister of agriculture again from October 1954 to November 1955, and a deputy prime minister from November 1955 to October 31, 1956. From October 30, 1956 he served as vice-prime minister in the Imre Nagy government. On November 2, he headed the Hungarian delegation negotiating the details of a withdrawal by the Soviet troops. On November 3, he was arrested by the KGB at the Soviet military base at Tököl, but he was released a few weeks later. In 1957, he became the general secretary of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the director of the Agricultural Science Institute. In 1964, he became general secretary of the Patriotic People’s Front. Between 1964 and 1970, he was vice-president of the Academy. He then served as general secretary again until 1971. He wrote many books about sociology and sociography.