COURAGE

connecting collections

Zbyněk Sekal was a Czech sculptor, painter and translator. He was arrested by the Gestapo in 1941 for his involvement in an illegal communist youth group and imprisoned in the concentration camps in Terezín and Mauthausen until the end of the war. He began studying at the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague in 1945, though he did not complete his studies and worked as a press agent and later as an editor at Svoboda publishing house. At first he devoted himself mainly to painting and then from the mid-1950s to sculpture – the focal point of his interest was the figure, particularly the bust and head portrayed in an expressive manner. He lived in Bratislava from 1953–1958, working as a translator. He exhibited his work with the group Máj 57 (May 57). 1965 saw his first solo exhibition at the Václav Špála Gallery. After the Soviet occupation in 1968, he first of all emigrated to Berlin and Dusseldorf, then in 1970 he settled permanently in Vienna. He taught at the Academy of Art in Stuttgart from 1972 to 1974. In 1984 he received the City of Vienna Prize for sculpture.

Jan Sekera was an art historian and gallerist. From the 1960s until 1987 he was the head of the Benedikt Rejt Gallery. Sekera was never politically active. He was the author of the collection system and used his wits to find ways for the gallery to purchase unofficial art even after 1968. Sekera describes how he composed committees in order to make the purchase of unofficial artists possible. An example of his unorthodox approach is how he was able to move money designated for road repairs into an art fund. In the 1990s, he became the head of České muzeum výtvarných umění (Czech Museum of Fine Arts).

Rostyslav Semkiv is a Ukrainian writer, literary critic, translator and publisher. He has obtained his PhD in philology from the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in Kyiv. From 2003 to date, he is director of the Smoloskyp publishing house in Kyiv. He directs the digitization projects of the Smoloskyp collection, and organizes national exhibitions, promoting the collection to university students, secondary school students and the general public.

Halyna Sevruk was born in 1929 in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. She was a sculptor, graphic artist, ceramicist, and member of the sixtiers movement (shestydesiatnyky) of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The Sevruk family moved to Kharkiv, Ukraine shortly after Halyna’s birth, a city where she spent much of her childhood. In 1945, they moved to Kyiv, where her father Silvester, had found work as an architect. Two years later, Sevruk began studying at a local art school, which she finished in 1949. Ten years later, she completed her studies at the Kyiv Art Institute, where she befriended the artist Alla Horska, a fellow sixtier. Together with Horska, Opanas Zalyvakha, Liudmila Semykina, and Halyna Zubchenko created the stained glass window at Kyiv University known as “Shevchenko. Mother” in 1964 to commemorate the centenary of the Ukrainian poet bard Taras Shevchenko’s birth. Censors destroyed the window, due to its unconventional style and use of national themes. Sevruk also created the ceramic painting that is one of the Sixtier’s Museum’s featured items, which depicts Ivan Svitlychny, Vasyl Stus and other writers as martyrs, persecuted for their words and the pursuit of truth.

Michael Shafir (born 1944) is a Romanian political scientist and journalist of Jewish origin. During the periods 1965–1967 and 1985–2005 he held various positions at Radio Free Europe and gradually asserted himself as an emblematic figure of the Romanian section of RFE. Born in Bucharest in a middle class Jewish family, Shafir emigrated legally to Israel in September 1961. Although his family was not politically persecuted, his father held strong beliefs that conflicted with the values promoted by the communist regime in Romania and thus distanced himself from the official propaganda from the early days of the new regime. Shafir confesses that his perception of the communist regime was definitely influenced by his early “anti-communist socialisation through jokes.” In this vein, he claims that his father mocked the official significance of such an event as Stalin’s death and even applied a lasting lesson to his son, who arrived home in tears because “our beloved father” had died. After dragging him to the bathroom and running the water tap, so that no-one would hear, he slapped the nine-year-old Michael and told him: “This is to remind you that your old man is still alive.” He also recalls that his family used to talk after the communist takeover about “how it was before [the Second World War],” and that “this before was idealised.”

In Israel, Shafir studied English philology, but chose political science as a second field of study. This decision marked his career, as well as his personal collection. While a student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he worked for two years as analyst for the Audience and Public Opinion Research Department at Radio Free Europe (1965–1967). His activity consisted of analyzing letters received from Romania. Subsequently, he worked for the Israeli press and was employed as a junior lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where in 1981 he defended his doctoral dissertation on intellectuals under the Ceaușescu regime. Shafir returned to RFE in 1985, to occupy the position of deputy director of the Audience and Public Opinion Research Department, which he held until 1988. Most of his activity consisted of evaluating the audience of RFE in Eastern Europe on the basis of questionnaires answered by individuals coming from communist countries. Between 1988 and 1991, Shafir was head of the Romanian Research Unit of RFE. While working for RFE, he also published studies and books about Eastern Europe. After the fall of communism, he moved from Munich to Prague in 1997 and continued to work for RFE until 2005. Between October 2003 and November 2004 he was also a member of the International Commission for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania, headed by the Romanian-born American Jewish writer and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. Between 2006 and 2012, Shafir was professor at the Faculty of European Studies of Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania.

According to his own assessment, Shafir would place himself in the category of an opponent to the communist regime in Romania, albeit one who manifested his opposition from exile through his activity at RFE. In fact, the most significant part of the Michael Shafir Collection originates from the period 1988–1991, when Shafir was head of the Romanian Research Unit of RFE. In this position, he was responsible for collecting, selecting, and analysing the information on Romania on which RFE programmes were based. This broadcasting agency played at that time an instrumental role in disseminating the messages of Romanian dissidents, and such messages reached it in various ways. Shafir thus had the chance to monitor an enormous amount of materials relating to Romania at a time when one of the most important topics of RFE broadcasts was the opposition to the Ceaușescu regime, however weak that might have been. This makes his collection an invaluable assembly of documents about Romanian dissent.

As for the concept of “cultural opposition,” Michael Shafir argued: “Here we have to make a distinction between dissidence and opposition. Things became confused because opposition in the Soviet Union started gradually to be called dissidence. Both dissidence and opposition are pre-conditioned by the willingness to make one’s voice heard. I have no idea how dissidence and, even more so, opposition can speak against the regime in a whisper. This is not opposition. Opposition must be [publicly] expressed.” In this respect, Shafir’s opinion mirrors that of the most notable dissidents in the Soviet bloc. On the other hand, Shafir has expressed his discontent with the term cultural opposition, “because in the Romanian case there is much talk about ‘opposition through culture,’” as he put it. This type of opposition, actually labelled “resistance through culture” by its practitioners in Romania, was no opposition at all according to Shafir. “Although among these cultural opponents I also found very respectable people, cultural opposition was a type of opposition […] which never assumed the risk of outspoken opposition. For me, Doina Cornea and few others like her, they were the opposition. Not a cultural opposition, but a perilous opposition, which took chances, courageous and, at the same time, modest […]. This is opposition,” concludes Shafir.