COURAGE

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Oles Obertas was born in a family of Ukrainian dissidents Evhen and Nina Obertas. He is a philologist and the author of numerous publications on the Ukrainian dissident movement and Ukrainian samizdat, including the monograph Ukrains’kyi Samvydav: Literaturna crytyka ta publitsystyka (1960 – pochatok 1970 rokiv) (The Ukrainian Samizdat: Literary Criticism and Journalism, 1960s – early 1970s). He obtained his PhD in philology from the Shevchenko Institute of Literature, the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Obertas was the first director of the Museum-Archive and Documentation Centre of Ukrainian Samvydav in Kyiv, taking the most active part in classifying and archiving Smoloskyp collections after their relocation in Ukraine. As the director of the Museum-Archive, he organized a series of international exhibitions and conferences, promoting Smoloskyp collections. In 2004, under his guidance, the Museum-Archive joined the International Samizdat Research Association (ISRA), an informal network of over twenty research institutions and archives, studying and preserving samizdat collections.

Born in 1911 to a Bulgarian family in the village of Tresonche in Macedonia (then Ottoman Empire, today Republic of Macedonia), Hristo Ognyanov grew up in a region with an ethnically mixed population. This region was contested by Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece and the Ottoman Empire. After the Balkan Wars, the village was included in Serbia. Hristo Ognyanov graduated from the Serbian elementary school in Tresonche, but was forced to interrupt his education and worked as a servant in various places in Skopje. In 1926, he left for Stara Zagora in Bulgaria, where he graduated from the National State School in 1932, while working in the building sector. During this period, Ognyanov joined communist circles, at the same time becoming a member of the Macedonian Youth Organization "Gotse Delchev". This was the time when his interest in literature formed. He started writing poems, collaborated with Eho, Svetulka [Firefly] and other magazines.

In 1932, Ognyanov became a student of law and state economics at the State University in Sofia. Influenced by his brother, he joined the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) and became a member of the Secretariat of the Union of Macedonian Youth Cultural and Educational Organization. He also joined the Macedonian Student Society "Vardar". These organizations were banned after the May 1934 coup d'état. In 1936 Ognyanov became volunteer assistant of the journal Obzor, “a weekly for politics, literature and public life”. Under the pseudonym "Ognyan", he wrote feuilletons and pamphlets, mainly devoted to national issues, especially on the Macedonian question. He opposed the idea of an independent Macedonian nation and language. He also published poetry.

In 1937 Ognyanov graduated from higher education and started working as an attorney-at-law. At the same time, he became reporter for one of the most prestigious Bulgarian newspapers at the time, Zora. In 1939, he printed his first poetry collection Yuzhni vetrove [“Southern Winds”], which was well accepted by the critics. In the same year, Ognyanov was accepted as an auxiliary member of the Journalists' Society and won a Humboldt Scholarship for studying international law in Germany. This coincided with the outbreak of the Second World War. Ognyanov was sent as a correspondent of the Zora newspaper in Berlin. In Berlin in 1940, he married his long-time partner Margarita Hristakeva. In January 1944 Hristo and Margarita Ognyanov moved to Zagreb, where Ognyanov became the secretary of Ivan Mihaylov. I. Mihaylov, head of IMRO, was closely related to German and especially Italian intelligence, and supported the idea of creating an autonomous Macedonian state or a "Macedonia attached to Bulgaria". In Zagreb, Ognyanov compiled his second poem collection "Pateshestvia. Stihotvorenia [Journey. Poems]".

In the middle of September 1944, days after the establishment of the new power in Bulgaria, Hristo Ognyanov managed to reach Vienna. His wife Margarita, though, remained in Bulgaria. After several years of unsuccessful attempts by Ognyanov to withdraw her to Austria, they divorced. IMRO was declared by the new regime a "fascist organization" and its agents – "enemies of the people". Ognyanov was convicted by the People's Court because of his “active fascist and pro-German activity" in absentia. He was also excluded by the Society of Metropolitan Journalists.

In Austria Ognyanov enrolled at the Insbruck University and married the opera singer Inge Mueller. Led by his patriotic views, in 1951 Ognyanov went briefly to Rome for service for Ivan Mihaylov, making research in archives and libraries for the "Macedonian Bulgarians". He recorded the memories of Ivan Mihaylov and other figures of the pro-Bulgarian Macedonian nationalist movement. In 1952 he was invited by the head of the Bulgarian department of The Voice of America in Munich (Alexander Dimitrov) to work at this radio, becoming responsible for the Bulgarian issues. In 1956 Ognyanov was sent to a one-year specialization at the headquarters of The Voice of America in the United States. There he also worked for the Macedonian Tribune newspaper, an organ of the Macedonian Patriotic Organization (MPO) in the United States, and as a lecturer in Bulgarian language at the Syracuse University. In the United States, he joined the circles of Bulgarian political émigrés and developed broad publicist and cultural activities.

In the 1960s Ognyanov began working for Radio Free Europe. There he led numerous programs on the history of Bulgarian literature and culture, in which he presented authors and their work that were banned by the communist authorities. In parallel, Ognyanov began the series "Bulgarian Literature under Communism", in which he critically assessed current developments and events in Bulgaria. He tried to reveal the lies of party propaganda. Among his wide activities were reviewing books and critically presenting articles from the Bulgarian press and broadcasts from Radio Sofia. Ognyanov’s program "Eleven Centuries of Christianity in Bulgaria" received an award by The Catholic Broadcasters Association of America. Under the name "Religion and Atheism in Bulgaria under Communism," he delivered a series of lectures in 1974. In Bulgaria, Ognyanov's activities, including those on religious subjects, were considered by the authorities as "subversive propaganda".

In 1965, the "Petar Beron" Bulgarian Academic Society (BAS "Petar Beron") was established in his home in Munich, with the purpose of uniting Bulgarian scholars working in the West. The society launched the book series "Schriftenreihe zur Bulgarienforschung" and organized numerous conferences. In 1981, in connection with the 1300th anniversary of the Bulgarian state, the society organized cultural events also in the US and Canada. Ognyanov was also a member of EXIL-P.E.N. Zentrum der Schriftstellerinnen und Schriftsteller im Exil in den deutschsprachigen Länden (Centre of Writers in Exile in the German-Speaking Countries). Ognyanov, thus, played an important role in unifying Bulgarian political emigrés, working closely with people from different generations, such as Petar Uvaliev (pseudonym Pierre Rouve, who worked for the BBC in London) as well as the younger émigrés of the 1970s, such as Dimitar Bochev, Dimitar Statkov, and Georgi Markov.

After the political changes of 1989 Ognyanov returned to Bulgaria many times; he was awarded the Madara Rider order, the third most important decoration awarded by the Republic of Bulgaria. His poems and essays were now finally also published in Bulgaria.

Ognyanov passed away in Salzburg, Austria, in 1997.

Petko Georgiev Mihaylov-Ogoyski was born in Ogoya village on 1 November 1929. He studied in his native village, started a high school education in the town of Svoge, moved to Sofia and graduated from the 5th Sofia Male High School in 1948. In 1949-1950 he was on compulsory military service, but in March 1950 he was arrested for the dissemination of political appeals. Ogoyski was sentenced to five years in prison for "enemy poems and conspiracy", and served the sentence in conditions of extreme in various prisons and in the First and Second Object of the Belene Forced Labor Camp on Persin Island. After his release in 1953, due to serving the sentence, considered in working days, he served his soldier service. As a former political prisoner, Ogoyski was allowed to work only in manual industrial jobs. He worked in agriculture, as a drilling worker at state enterprises, and construction painter.

In 1955 Petko G. Mihaylov-Ogoyski married Yagoda Petkova Danova-Yusova from the village of Chepintsi, in 1956 was born their first son Petko; in 1959 – their daughter Maria.

In this period Ogoyski began a history study at the Faculty of History and Philosophy at the Sofia State University, but his graduation was thwarted by his repeated condemnation of "enemy verses" and imprisonment in 1962. After the discharge from prison in 1963, he became a member and chairman of the literary club at the house-museum “Yavorov” in Sofia, which was purged in 1970 after two of its members, Ogoyski’s friends, escaped to the West.

In 1966, the third child of Petko and Yagoda Ogoyski – a son, Hristo, was born. In the 1970s and 1980s, Ogoyski was a painter and worked in a storehouse in which he became a “chief warehouse of paints and tools”. In his free time, he conducted local ethnographical research. Ogoyksi became a member of the Sofia regional literary society and of the Union of the Regional Ethnographers (kraevedi). Some of his texts critical of the regime were published in newspapers and magazines under pseudonyms such as Mitso Gitsin, Petko Murgashki, Dragoslav Bratski, Yaroslav Persinski.

After the collapse of the communist regime in 1989, Ogoyski was among the founding members of the restored Bulgarian Agrarian National Union “Nikola Petkov”, which became part of the Union of Democratic Forces, the main anti-communist coalition consisting of several political organizations. In 1990 Ogoyski was elected member of the Seventh Grand National Assembly of Bulgaria (from 10 July 1990 to 2 October 1991), which adopted the new Constitution of the Republic of Bulgaria. He also became a member of the Union of Bulgarian Writers and of the Bulgarian Historical Society. He was appointed as editor-in-chief of the newspaper "Zemedelsko zname" ["Agrarian Banner'], the daily newspaper of the re-established Bulgarian Agrarian National Union (BZNS) "Nikola Petkov" (1991-1993). Texts of Petko Ogoyski are included in the School Reader "Zabranenite pisateli" ["Banned Writers"], a joint publication of the Hannah Arendt Center, the Centre for European Studies and the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung in Sofia in 2013. In 2015 Petko Ogoyski, together with Bulgarian politicians (mayor of Sofia, Yordanka Fandakova; Bulgarian Ombudsman Konstantin Penchev), journalists (Georgi Koritarov), historians (Ivaylo Znepolski, Antonina Zhelyazkova, Valeri Todorov), the writer Georgi Gospodinov, and other public figures was honoured by the magazine “Zaman Bulgaria” for his “contribution to public peace and ethnic understanding in Bulgaria” - http://zaman.bg/bg/vzamanv-vratchi-edinstvenite-nagradi-za-prinos-kam-obshtestveniya-mir/

A biographical study is dedicated to Petko Ogoyski (Ivanova 2012); with a film about him in 2014, the documentary series of the Bulgarian National Television "Open Files" by the investigative journalist Hristo Hristov started.

Valdur Ohakas was an Estonian artist. He studied at the State School of Industrial and Pictorial Arts in 1942–1943, but was called up into the German army in 1943. After that, in 1944–1948, he studied at Tartu State Art Institute, but he did not complete his studies there either. He and others were arrested in 1948 for being members of the Tartu Circle, and sent to a prison camp in Karaganda in Kazakhstan. He was released in 1956. Afterwards, he returned to Tartu and worked as a freelance artist. As a member of the Tartu Circle, he turned to abstract art. In 1959, he became a member of the Estonian Artists' Union.

Attila Olasz, son of Sándor Olasz, painter

Sándor Olasz was born in Hódmezővásárhely on 19 July 1949. He graduated in 1967 from Gábor Bethlen High School in his birthplace. After high school, he graduated in 1973 from the University of Szeged as a Literature and French teacher. In 1973, he was made a member of the permanent editorial staff of the periodical Tiszatáj, and he served as the main editor between 1996 and 2011. Tiszatáj is a literary, artistic, social, and academic periodical which publishes a diverse range of writings and articles.

Oleskandr Oles (Kandyba) was a Ukrainian symbolist, dramatist, poet, and essayist, born in 1878 in the town of Bilopillya, in the Kharkiv guberniia of the Russian Empire (now located in the Sumy region of Ukraine). The Kandyba family were descendants of a well-known Cossack lineage, which meant Oles’ viewed the Bolshevik Revolution with considerable scepticism. In 1917 he had published a volume of poetry in which he had articulated his desire for the restoration of Ukrainian statehood. After the coup, Oles’ remained in exile from 1919 onward, living in Budapest, Vienna, Berlin and Prague. He published many volumes over the course of his lifetime, most of which focused on his longing for Ukraine. His son Oleh Olzhych (Kandyba), born in 1907, became a member of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists in 1929, staying loyal to the Melnyk faction (OUN-M) after the split in 1938. Olzhych returned to Ukraine in 1941 to help form the Ukrainian National Council. The later years of Oles’ life were difficult. Not only did Hitler divide Czechoslovakia, Oles’ own son Olzhych was captured by the Nazis and tortured to death in the concentration camp Sachsenhausen in June 1944. Oles’ himself died shortly after learning of his son’s death, succumbing to his battle with cirrhosis.

Jerzy Onuch (born 1954) is a world-renowned artist, lecturer, curator, and diplomat. In 1976, together with Janusz Bałdyga and Łukasz Szajna, he created the Dziekanka Workshop group, in which he operated for the next few years. In 1979 he became the co-director of the Student Center for Artistic Communities, then the Dziekanka Workshop, and held it until 1986, when he went to the USA and then to Canada. In the 1990s, in addition to the presentation of his own work, he engaged in the study and promotion of young Ukrainian art. From 1997 to 2004 he was the director of the Center for Contemporary Art in Kiev, then - in the years 2005-2010 - the director of the Polish Institute in Kiev, and from 2010 to 2015 - the director of the Institute of Polish Culture in New York.
In the 1970s, Onuch studied painting and graphics at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. In 1976, together with Janusz Bałdyga and Łukasz Szajna, thanks to the offer of director of Dziekanka Wojciech Krukowski, they started to use a camera to carry out their own work. The show of Onuch, Bałdyga, and Szajna resulted in an invitation to permanent cooperation submitted by Krukowski. In such circumstances, the three young artists founded Dziekanka Workshop, a venture focused on an open creative process, experimentation and self-study work. From 1979, after Krukowski left, Onuch and Tomasz Sikorski took over the rudders of the Dziekanka Student Center of Artistic Communities, which in 1981 transformed into Dziekanka Workshop - an autonomous unit in the ASP structure (previously the SCŚA functioned under the umbrella of the SZSP).
In his own art pieces, as in the organizational work, Onuch was interested in the art of new media, installations, and performances. He also conducted theoretical investigations. In the 1980s, he organized over seventy exhibitions and other artistic events. In 1986 he was invited to a conference in Vancouver; he did not come back from this trip, choosing to stay in exile and settle in Toronto after a year in the USA. He continued his artistic, educational and curatorial activity.
In the mid-nineties, Onuch returned to Poland, where he regularly came with lectures and took part in exhibitions (for example at the Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw). At the same time, he began to deal with young Ukrainian art, acting as a curator of exhibitions and a juror in competitions. In 1997 he became the director of the Center for Contemporary Art in Kiev, bringing to the city the works of world-renowned avant-garde artists and promoting young Ukrainian artists engaged politically. Then, Onuch took the position of director of the Polish Institute in Kiev (2005-2010), and finally - from 2010 to 2015 - the director of the Polish Cultural Institute in New York.
In the time of state socialism in Poland, Onuch created and exhibited progressive, independent, experimental art that undoubtedly went beyond the framework defined in the official assumptions of cultural policy. However, the niche nature of this activity did not attract repressions, although it was associated with modest and uncertain means.

Source:
Tymoteusz Onyszkiewicz, Fuck 89 Manifesto, 2014.

Aleš Opekar is a Czech musicologist, journalist and director of the Popmuseum in Prague. During his graduate and postgraduate studies, he focused on, among other things, the lyrics of Czech pop music. As a musicologist and music journalist, he published in Gramorevue, Melodie and Mladá fronta in the 1980s. He worked as a journalist in magazine Rock&Pop in the 1990s. He gives lectures on pop music at universities and he worked in Institute for Musicology on the Czech Academy of Sciences until 1998. He is active in Czech Radio, where he was the head of the Department of Jazz and Pop Music between 1999 and 2012; he has been a music editor since 2013. He collaborated on the filming of the documentary TV series Bigbít (1998, Czech Television). He initiated the founding of the museum and archive of pop music (the Popmuseum), where the archive materials were originally stored after they were collected for the filming of the TV series.

Traian Orban (b. Petroșani, 20 februarie 1944) is a vet by profession. However following his participation in the Revolution of 1989, this became an insignificant detail for his identity. As he presents himself, in a veritable declaration of faith in the mission taken up by the institution that he has run for more than two and a half decades: “At present I am a pensioner, a category II invalid and disabled since I was shot during the Revolution. I am the president of the Memorial to the Revolution Association, founded in 1990, an association that was set up out of the desire to honour the memory of the heroes, to create a centre of documentation, to find out the truth about the Revolution, to create a memorial complex of monuments marking the most important locations in the city, where people were killed.”

The Revolution of 1989 brought a change of regime for the whole of Romania, but Traian Orban’s direct participation in the revolt in Timişoara was an event that marked him profoundly with the drama of the events and radically changed his way of looking at life. Traian Orban was shot on 17 December, one of the bloodiest days of the events that took place in Timişoara at the start of the Romanian Revolution of 1989. As recalled by Traian Orban, the moment that changed his destiny unfolded thus: “I arrived in Liberty Square in front of the Macul Roşu [“red poppy”] confectionery. Some individuals had devastated the confectionery, taken the furniture out onto the tram lines and set it on fire. The second-hand shop in the square had also been devastated; people were coming out with clothes, with cameras, with TVs and other valuable objects. They were offered to the demonstrators. We refused to take them. We protested, but in vain – they got on with the job and disappeared with the objects. In Liberty Square the tanks arrived. One of the tanks was set on fire and headed quickly towards Unification Square along Str. Alecsandri, to the cheers of the crowd. The cordons of soldiers were trying to block access to the square. There was still no shooting. I took part in blocking a tank in Liberty Square; some young people positioned themselves in front of it, and tried to stick various objects into its tracks. I got my hand on a tank towing cable, and stuck it into the tracks, and I asked a young man to put a rag in the exhaust pipe, with the result that the engine stopped. Immediately to the cheers of the crowd, the tank stopped. Near the garrison in Liberty Square there were some cars. One of them was set on fire. I found out later that they were the cars of some military staff in Division 8, which had its headquarters in the square. After the burning of the car, the signal was given to start the repression; it was after 4.30 pm when they started shooting. They were probably using training bullets, because nobody was wounded. There were cheers; a lot of people were trying to withdraw from the square. We tried to head for the Opera along Str. Alba Iulia, but a column of demonstrators was coming from the Opera shouting ‘Freedom.’ The crowd in the square thinned out. I saw a few people being detained. I didn’t want to go away from in front of the garrison; I was shouting: “The army is with us!... Down with Ceauşescu!” I want to tell you that between 4 and 4.30 I talked with some conscripts. They told me they had been on alert since 5 am. They had weapons, but they didn’t have bullets. I offered them cigarettes. I noticed that after 4.30 the firing got more intense. I saw that pieces of plaster were falling from the walls, a sign that indeed they were firing real bullets. I was scared and withdrew into various buildings on the square. Then I went back into the square, trying to head towards the museum on the then Str. Karl Marx, but another column of demonstrators came from there too and I saw an officer being attacked by the demonstrators. They were beating him. We went back, back in front of the garrison, where before 5 pm three civilians with pistols emerged from the military garrison together with three men in military greatcoats and caps and with automatics in their hands. I saw that from the Division headquarters, where the statue of Decebalus is, they were firing from the balcony and from a window; I saw some conscripts trying to put out a fire, a Dacia car. At a certain point, when I was at the crossing of Liberty Square with Karl Marx, I talked a little with the soldiers and I heard that a soldier had been shot. Beside me someone was wounded, and I bent down over him to see what had happened to him. He was bleeding heavily and the blood splashed on my face and my clothes. At the same moment I was shot in the leg, before 5 pm. I cried out; I fainted with pain; I could feel I was being carried by some young people to a car, and I was taken by car to the County Hospital. The pain was very severe when they held me by the wounded leg. They thought I had been hit somewhere in the face, in the head, because I was covered with blood. In the hospital, I was undressed; I was put on a stretcher; they gave me first aid; but I was left in the corridor. Probably there were much greater emergencies. In the corridors, on stretchers, in wheelchairs, there were wounded people; some were shouting; there were dead there; it was beyond description. Stretchers were coming with wounded from ambulances, which kept bringing more and more wounded. I waited a long time; I was in the corridor; it was cold; it was winter. At a certain point, a stretcher-bearer came up to me and said he worked in the village of Şipet, in Dorna. He asked me how it had happened; I told him. He got to know me. I asked him to bring me a blanket and he suggested to some stretcher-bearers that it would be a good idea for me to be taken to the Orthopaedic Hospital. And so I got out of the County Hospital, where I heard that horrible things happened. I was transported to the Orthopaedic Hospital after about an hour; it was after 6 pm. I was taken into a ward; a preliminary toilet was carried out, but it was all an incredible shambles. The hospital was overcrowded. The next day I was moved to another ward. After about nine days, I heard that a team of doctors from Austria had arrived in the hospital; they treated me in an initial phase, and then I was transported as part of a convoy of ambulances to Vienna. On 27 December I was the first patient the Austrians operated on. They were a team of Austrian doctors from various hospitals; from the Polytrauma Hospital there was Professor Johan Poigenfurt, who was the head of the clinic. During the period when these doctors were treating the wounded, they were still shooting in Timişoara. These doctors were extraordinary. They saved a lot of people from perishing.” (Orban 1997)

Traian Orban is at present one of the leading figures in civil society in the west of Romania, a respected personality in the Romanian public space and one of the most insistent fighters for finding out the truth about the Romanian Revolution of 1989. As he confessed to the COURAGE project researchers, Traian Orban has a vision of communism, at least the communism that he experienced in Romania, that is utterly unequivocal: “It was a political system without a God; it was a system against human nature. It cultivated fear, opportunism, toadyism, laziness, snitching – just about everything that is low and base in people. It didn’t bring wellbeing to people; it reduced most of them to the verge of bare subsistence. Communism generated a lot of suffering through dictatorship, through the repressive system that it embodied, through the personality cult, through restrictions on human rights. With all sorts of limits imposed, with food rationing, with insufficient clothing. Nothing was for people; on the contrary it was against people, against people’s normality. With the hunger, with the cold, with the fear that it brought, communism was against people.”

Lajos Ordass (originally Wolf) was a Hungarian Lutheran bishop. He was born in 1901, in Torzsa. He studied theology in Budapest, Sopron, and Wittenberg. He became a clergyman in 1924. Between 1931 and 1941, he was a pastor in Cegléd, and from 1941 to 1945, he was a priest in Kelenföld (Budapest). On 19 March 1944, he changed his name from Wolf to Ordass as a protest against the occupation of Hungary by Germany. In September 1945, the Lutheran church district of Bánya elected him to serve as their pastor. Three years later, the Economic Police of the State Protection Authority made a perquisition in his home. He was arrested and interrogated, but later he was released. On 8 September 1948, he was arrested again, and on 1 October he was condemned to two years prison for allegedly having “speculated with foreign currency”. The political leadership thought that Ordass was the main obstacle to a forthcoming “agreement” between the state and the Lutheran Church. The bishop did not want to resign from his office because he had been elected by the people of the Church, and he thought that he had never abused their confidence and would not do so even if under threat. However, he lost his office because of the ecclesiastical special disciplinary court, which had been threatened by the secret police, so it removed him from his office in an unlawful procedure just two months before his release (May 1950). He lived a life of withdrawal from public affairs until 1956, when his rehabilitation was finished in early October thanks to the meetings of the Central Committee of World Council of Churches and the State Office for Ecclesiastical Affairs, which had taken place in August 1956 at Galyatető. He returned to his office to lead the Southern Lutheran Church District (which had been created in the meantime) on 3 November 1956. He was a bishop until June 1958, when the Church forced him to retire. He never returned to the leadership of the Lutheran Church.

Gerhard Ortinau was born on 18 March 1953 in a village on the Bărăgan Plain (Borcea), in a family of Banat Danube Swabians, a German-speaking population settled in this region during the eighteenth century by the Habsburg Empire. His family was deported from the Banat in 1951 as part of the forced displacements of population from the border region with Yugoslavia to areas in the Bărăgan (in South-East Romania), because his parents were labelled by the communist authorities as “former exploiters” (ACNSAS, I 233 471, vol. 1, 1).

From 1972 to 1976, Ortinau studied German and Romanian philology at the University of Timișoara. During his studies he was one of the initiators of Aktionsgruppe Banat, a group of young Romanian-German writers, which also included Albert Bohn, Rolf Bossert, Werner Kremm, Johann Lippet, Anton Sterbling, William Totok, Richard Wagner, and Ernest Wichner, most of them students at the same university. The literature created by this group sought to be socially committed, to offer a critical view of society. Because of their non-conformist lifestyle and because they adopted in their literary texts ideological perspectives inspired by the neo-Marxism of the Frankfurt School and certain aesthetic principles which contradicted the literary canons of the time, Aktionsgruppe Banat was considered by the Romanian communist authorities to be a subversive group. Ortinau, together with his colleagues, was attentively put under surveillance starting from 1974, and subsequently he was subject to a series of repressive measures. In 1973, the Securitate became interested in Ortinau’s literary activity because an informer of the Securitate talked about the poems he had sent to the cultural magazine Echinox in Cluj, which the secret police considered subversive (ACNSAS, I 233 471, vol. 1, 6–7). Also, another informer highlighted in his notes the critical ethos of the poem Die moritat von den 10 wortarten der traditionellengrammatik (sic!) [The street ballad of the ten parts of speech of the traditional grammar], which included allusions to the abuses of Ceaușescu’s dictatorship. This was published in 1974 in the magazine Neue Literatur (a publication of the Romanian Writers’ Union for the German-speaking public) because it had escaped the watchful eye of the censorship.

Because they felt they were being watched, the group members planned to influence the Securitate by agreeing to collaborate as informers. Thus, Gerhard Ortinau and William Totok agreed to become “sources” of the Securitate and supplied the secret police with a series of items of information trying to present the group in a positive light. This information was given with the agreement of the other group members,who were also kept up to date with the actions of the Securitate. By corroborating their notes with those received from numerous other informers, who discussed the group’s activity, the Securitate discovered their double game (Petrescu 2015, 135–136).

Based on this detailed information about his literary activity, on 2 October 1975, the Securitate searched Gerhard Ortinau’s house and confiscated many manuscripts, letters, and books (Totok 2001, 46–47). On 12 October 1975, Gerhard Ortinau, Richard Wagner, William Totok, and Gerhardt Csejka, the last-named being a supporter of the young Romanian-German writers, were arrested because they were accused of wanting to cross the border illegally (ACNSAS, I 210 845, vol. 2, 69). This accusation came when the four of them were heading towards the house of William Totok’s parents in Comloșu Mare, which was close to the border. In fact, the Securitate wanted to accuse them of undermining the regime. During the investigation, the local Party leaders intervened to ask for their release because their conviction for political reasons could have caused reactions in the international press (Totok 2001, 47–48). As a result, the four were released after about a week of interrogation, but the activity of the group of young writers was suppressed through repressive measure. In the following years, Ortinau continued to be persecuted by the authorities. In September 1977, the Securitate confiscated other manuscripts and forbade him from publishing (ACNSAS, I 233 471, vol.1, 162). After emigrating to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1980, he settled in West Berlin and continued his literary activity. He published several literary volumes such as Verteidigung des Kugelblitzes: Erzählungen (The defence of ball lightning: Stories; 1976) and Ein leichter Tod: Erzählungen (An easy death; 1996).

Gyula Ortutay was both an ethnographer and politician.   
He was born in Subotica, Serbia, in 1910. His parents were Ilona Borsodi and István Ortutay, a journalist and editor of the Szegedi Napló. Following secondary school Gyula Ortutay began his academic studies at the University of Szeged. He studied Greek and Latin, and graduated in 1934. He was a founder of the Artistic Youth College of Szeged [Szegedi Fiatalok Művészeti Kollégiuma]. In 1935 he began work at the Hungarian National Museum. Later, in 1944, he joined the Hungarian Radio [Magyar Rádió]. During his carrier there, working with Patria audio publishers, he organized several ethnographic recordings with László Lajtha, Béla Bartók, and Zoltán Kodály. He wrote about these works in his diary. They recorded folk tales, folk songs, folk customs, religious songs, and also helped performers travel to Hungary. He launched his political career in 1943 through his contact with communist intellectuals. He served as Minister of Religion and Education between 1947 and 1950. While his political role gained importance, he also worked as an ethnographer and folklorist. In 1949 he presented the speech, “A magyar néprajztudomány elvi kérdései” [Theoretical Questions of Hungarian Ethnography], which defined the role of Hungarian ethnography in the socialist era. From 1951 Ortutay served as the Head of the Folklore Department at Eötvös Loránd University. Between 1949 and 1956 he was also the chairman of the Hungarian Ethnographic Society, and later, between 1957 and 1963, was the rector of Eötvös Loránd University. He was one of the most important academic figures of Hungarian folklore during the socialist era; he supported folklore collections and research, and highlighted the importance of informative work. He curated a very popular series for Magyar Radió, the Kis Magyar Néprajz [Little Hungarian Ethnography].

He was married to Zsuzsa Kemény.

Željko Oset was born in Celje (Slovenia) in 1984. He obtained his Ph.D. in history at the University of Ljubljana and works as a professor at the University of Nova Gorica. He began his professional career at the Institute for Contemporary History (Inštitut za novejšo zgodovino) in Ljubljana, where he established himself as a researcher of the intellectual history of Slovenia in the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

Oset believes that environmental movements were the forerunner of political organization and that the Communist Party allowed them to appease discontent: "It is interesting that the Party allowed these environmental movements and thus enabled people to express their dissatisfaction with the authorities. And it was like that throughout Yugoslavia - it was a release valve for dissent. But the authorities were vigilant about minor disagreements, making sure they did not turn into some kind of movements that would become the opposition, because the authorities would appear weak. Criticism was allowed, but the boundaries of tolerance were not defined. I know there was pressure against environmental activists in Slovenia, but nobody ended up in prison” (Oset, interview, July 6, 2017).

Blaž Otrin was born in Ljubljana in 1973. He was educated in Ljubljana. He has a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and master in history. In 2000, he was employed by Archdiocesan Archives in Ljubljana. He is in charge of personal funds, including Anton Vovk's fund. During socialism he was a minor, so he was not involved in oppositional activities. Otrin considers research and preservation of the materials on anti-communist movements important. He also considers this particular fund important in that regard. Otrin's attitude toward the communist regime is multi-dimensional. His family history includes both sides, people who were supporters of communism and people who were opponents of communism. Otrin believes that Slovenian society has not done enough to clarify its relationship to the Communist regime and that, among other things, the absence of lustration affects social attitudes toward communism.

Milan Otáhal was a Czech historian who dealt with contemporary history, mostly the period of so-called normalization, and a former dissident. He studied Czechoslovak and World History at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague. From 1955 he was a scientist at the Historical Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. He participated in the reform process of the 1960s as a member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and was also one of the authors of the book Seven Prague Days, the so-called “Black Book”. As a result, he was expelled from the party and prosecuted. He was one of the founding signatories of Charter 77, and in the 1970s and 1980s he published the Samizdat Collection of Historical Studies.

Romualdas Ozolas (1939-2015) was a Lithuanian philosopher, politician, activist, writer and lecturer at Vilnius University. He was a member of the Communist Party from 1973 to 1990. During Soviet times he occupied high formal positions: in 1975-1980 he worked as an assistant to the deputy chair of the Soviet Lithuanian Council of Ministers, and in 1980-1989 he was deputy director of Mintis (Thought), one of the biggest publishers in the republic. Nevertheless, he was very active and involved in informal networks that took initiatives to promote Lithuanian culture and history. During Gorbachev’s perestroika period, he expressed the opinion that cultural opposition should not be limited to cultural work only, and encouraged making political claims against Moscow. He was a member of the Lithuanian independence movement Sąjūdis from 1988 to 1990. From 1990 to 1991, he served as deputy prime minister of Lithuania. He joined the Lithuanian Centrist Union in 1993, and was its chairman until 2000. In 1996, he was elected to the Seimas, the Lithuanian parliament, and served until 2000. From 2003 to 2007, he chaired the National Centrist Party (NCP), which has since been renamed the Lithuanian Centrist Party in 2005.