COURAGE

connecting collections

Ondřej Vojtěchovsky, Czech historian and professor at Charles University in Prague, is a specialist in contemporary Yugoslav and Czech history, especially the post-war period. He completed his Doctoral dissertation on the topic of the Yugoslav Cominformist emigration in Prague. By virtue of his research, Vojtěchovsky met some of the members of the Yugoslav Cominformists in Prague, among them Ivan Sinanovič, who handed him over the collection of leaflets in 2011. These leaflets form now the Yugoslav Cominformists in Prague collection which is located in Vojtěchovský's apartment in Prague.

Anton Vovk was a Slovenian cleric, the (arch)bishop of Ljubljana. He was born in the same house as the famous Slovenian poet France Prešeren (1800-1849), because they were related through Vovk's grandmother. He attended Gymnasium in Kranj, and entered the seminary at Šentvid. He was ordained a priest in 1923. He served as chaplain in Metlika and Tržič. He became the pastor in Tržič. In 1940 he became a canon. Throughout the Second World War he presided over a committee tasked with helping priests who fled from the German-occupied part of Slovenia to the Ljubljana Province. In 1944 he became the rector of the seminary. 

In June of 1945 he became the vicar of the Ljubljana Diocese, because Bishop Gregorij Rožman fled the country ahead of the takeover by the communist regime. On December 1, 1946, he was consecrated as auxiliary bishop of Ljubljana. He was attacked at the Novo mesto rail station on January 20, 1952, by communist activists, who poured gasoline on him and tried to set him on fire.  Anton Vovk died on July 7, 1963. 

Vovk's primary concern and job was to lead the Ljubljana (arch)diocese as a bishop (Pope John XXIII elevated the Ljubljana Diocese to an archdiocese on December 22, 1961). He was the creator or receiver of most of the archival materials contained in the Anton Vovk Collection. He considered the preservation of the collected records so important that he kept the existence of his own diary secret even from his closest collaborators. The communist regime saw him as an enemy, so an attack was prepared against him by pouring gasoline on him and burning him. Vovk himself did not publicly challenge the regime, except when he publicly preached Catholic teachings. The purpose of collecting the materials was to preserve them for the generations.

Ivan Vrona was born on September 29, 1887 in Otrocz, Chełm county in the Lublin guberniia of the Russian Empire. After spending two years in exile in Siberia for revolutionary activities, he studied law at Moscow University (1910-14) and art at Konstantin Yuon’s studio in Moscow (1912-14) and later at the Ukrainian Academy of Arts in Kyiv (1918-20). In 1918, he joined the Borotbist faction of the Ukrainian Party of Socialists Revolutionaries and in 1920 the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine. In 1921, he was elected to the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee.

In the 1920s, Vrona helped organize the Kyiv Art Institute and served as its first rector. He also taught there in 1930-1933 and 1945-1948. He was a founder and leader of the Association of Revolutionary Art of Ukraine (ARMU), whose program he outlined in a publication titled The Art of the Revolution and ARMU in 1926. Vrona also served as director of the Kyiv Museum of Western and Eastern Art and chief inspector of art education for the People’s Commissariat of Education. His art criticism was published in the periodicals “Zhyttia I Revoliutsiia (“Life and Revolution”) and “Krytyka” (“Criticism”).

In 1933, Vrona was arrested and deported to a western Siberian labor camp. He was released in 1936 and rehabilitated in 1943. After being allowed to return to Ukraine in 1944, he became a research associate of the Institute of Fine Arts, Folklore, and Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR and wrote monographs on the artists Karpo Trokhymenko (1957), Mykhailo Derehus (1958), and Anatol Petrytsky (1968) as well as two chapters for volume 5 of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR.

Gyula (Julius) Várallyay (1937–) was a second year student at the Technical University of Budapest in autumn 1956. He took an active part as a member of the student revolutionary committee and the National Guard of students. In late November, he left his native land for the West, much like the circa 7,000 students who arrived as refugees in several host-countries. He opted for the United States, where he managed to complete his studies at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the meantime, he served as elected president of the worldwide organization of Hungarian émigré students, the UFHS / MEFESZ, from late 1959 till early 1961, and later he also supported a number of Hungarian-American organizations. He spent eight years working in developing countries in Asia, Africa, and South America with an international consulting firm, and he worked at the World Bank for over 29 years. He has been a board member of the Hungarian American Coalition, and he continues to do work as an international consultant. He also writes on public issues in Hungary. Since 2002, he has divided his time between Budapest and Washington, D.C.