COURAGE

connecting collections

Gintarė Paškevičiūtė-Breivienė is a doctor of medicine specialising in pediatric surgery. She is the daughter of of Aldona Liobytė. The private papers of Paškevičiūtė-Breivienė hold letters, drafts, manuscripts and photographs of Aldona Liobytė. Some of this material was published in the book Aldona Liobytė (1915–1985). Korespondencijos fragmentai (Aldona Liobytė [1915-1985]. Extracts from her Correspondence), published in 2015. Paškevičiūtė-Breivienė is one of the editors of the book. 

Dubravka Peić Čaldarović was born in Dubrava near Vrbovec in 1955. She graduated with a degree in history and sociology from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science in Zagreb in 1980. In 1996, she earned a master’s degree from that Faculty’s History Department. As of 1986 she began working at the Museum of the Croatian People's Revolution in Zagreb, where she was the head of the Document and Stamp Collection. After the merger of the Museum of the Croatian People's Revolution and the Croatian Museum of History into the Croatian History Museum, she became the head of the Heraldry and Sigillography Collection. In early 2006, she became the manager of Documentary Collection II of the Croatian History Museum, which she still runs today. She is the author of several solo exhibitions and numerous catalogues published by the Croatian History Museum and other museums in Croatia. She was a representative of the Croatian History Museum in the educational projects organized by the Zagreb Museums to observe International Museum Day 1997–1998, and she has initiated numerous heraldic and genealogical museum workshops. She has participated in 17 scholarly and professional conferences in the field of heraldry, history and museology, of which ten were international. She is a member of several professional associations, such as the International Council of Museums (ICOM), the Croatian History Association and the Cultural Tourism Section of the Croatian Museum Society. She is also one of the founders of the Croatian Heraldry and Vexillology Association (Dubravka Peić Čaldarović).

He is considered to be one of the most important Serbian authors of the twentieth century.

He won the prestigious NIN Prize for the novel Hodočašće Arsenija Njegovana [The Pilgrimage of Arsenij Njegovan; also translated into English as Houses of Belgrade] in 1971 and a number of other awards: Sterija Theatre Award (1972), publishing association of Serbia award (1977), Radio Zagreb Award (1982), Annual Prize of the Writers’ Association of Serbia for his collected works (1985), Njegoš Prize (1987), Jakov Ignjatović Foundation Award (1991), and the Merit Order for the People with a Silver Star for contributions to cultural creativity.

Other well-known works include Zlatno runo [The Golden Fleece], Besnilo [Rabies], Odbrana i poslednji dani [The Defence and the Last Days], Kako upokojiti vampira [How to Quiet a Vampire], Atlantida [Atlantis], and Vreme čuda [The Time of Miracles].

Starting in 1945, still in his youth, Pekić joined a number of illegal youth opposition groups. The anti-communist activities of these groups consisted of distributing propaganda and publishing the opposition newspaper Democracy, demonstrating and passive resistance (including subscribing to the opposition press, celebrating Christmas and Easter, avoiding to take part in youth work actions). For these actions, Pekić and his like-minded friends were often physically assaulted, and eventually sentenced to prison in 1949.

The penalties for leaflet distribution and demonstrating were very harsh, but followed the politics of the years following the Tito–Stalin split, when the regime was particularly sensitive to any type of perceived threats, either inside or outside the country. Pekić was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, but he was released in 1953 during a general amnesty of political prisoners.

Due to his consistent oppositional stance, Pekić was stripped of his passport while planning to immigrate to London in 1970. While living without a passport and under investigation for a year, he was awarded the NIN Prize in 1971. Afterwards, his passport was returned and he left to meet his family who were living in London. Upon leaving the country, Yugoslav authorities declared him to be persona non grata and prevented his works from being published in Yugoslavia.

Pekić returned to Yugoslavia in the mid-1980s, by which time he had become a famous writer. He was soon admitted to the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts as a corresponding member, was elected as the Vice President of the Serbian PEN Centre, and became a member of the board of the Association of Writers of Serbia.

Jiří Pelikán was a Czech journalist, communist functionary, exile politician and publisher of the quarterly “Listy”. He was born on 7 February 1923 in Olomouc as the son of the sculptor Julius Pelikán. He started studying at a grammar school in Olomouc but then joined the communist resistance during World War II and was imprisoned for several months by the Gestapo. He was released in 1941 and was hidden until the end of the war in an unknown place. After the war, he joined the communist youth movement and started studying at the Political and Social University. He was a secretary for the university’s committee of the Communist Party (1946-51) and a member of the board of the Regional Committee of the Communist Party in Prague. During the second half of the 1940s and during the 1950s, Pelikán held several other functions at various levels of the apparatus of the Party and its youth organisation. After February 1948, he was a member of the Action Committee of the National Front, responsible for the exclusion of thousands of university students based on their political views. He was a deputy in the National Assembly between 1948 and 1954 and later between 1964 and 1969. As general secretary of the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Union of Youth (1953-55), he was the leader of the communist youth organisation; he was head of the International Union of Students between 1964 and 1969. Pelikán later became general director of Czechoslovak Television – from 1963 until October 1968 when he was forced to leave the position by the Soviets.

During the Prague Spring 1968, Pelikán was one of the active advocates for reforming the Party, he was, therefore, placed in a less high-profile position in the diplomatic service after the Soviet invasion and the beginning of Normalization. He worked as a cultural attaché at the Czechoslovak embassy in Rome; he refused to return to Czechoslovakia in 1969 and applied for political asylum in Italy.

He soon became involved in the exile activities in Italy. As a former active participant in the democratization processes during the Prague Spring, he started publishing the left-oriented magazine “Listy” in 1971. In the magazine, he endeavoured to truthfully and objectively inform people about public matters and political repression in Czechoslovakia, as well as give banned authors the opportunity to publish. He was granted Italian citizenship in 1977 and was a deputy of the European Parliament for the Italian Democratic Socialist Party (Partito Socialista Democratico Italiano) between 1979 and 1989. He was a very active participant in Czechoslovak exile activities. In 1986, he was a founding member of the Czechoslovak Documentation Centre of Independent Literature, which was founded in West Germany and led by the historian Vilém Prečan.

Anna Perczel (1942–) is a Hungarian architect. She graduated from the Faculty of Architecture at the Technical University of Budapest in 1967. From 1967 to 2004, Perczel worked as a settlement planner architect at the Institute of Town Planning of Budapest. She then began working at the Office of Research and Monuments of the Scientific and Designer Institute of Urban Construction. In the 1980s, she became one of the founders of the Danube Circle, an environmental protest movement. She deals with the historical districts of Budapest. She is one of the founders of the Caution Association (2004), which tries to protect the Jewish Quarter.