COURAGE

savienojot kolekcijas

The Oral History Collection at CNSAS is a unique collection of this kind as it includes only interviews with individuals who are the subjects of personal files in the CNSAS Archives, and who after studying these personal files created by the Securitate agreed to narrate their own experience of entanglement with the secret police. The interviewees include not only individuals who were under surveillance and thus victims of the Securitate, but also individuals who collaborated with the secret police to provide information on others: family, friends, and colleagues. Both types of interviews represent the response of the interviewees to the narrative created about them by the Securitate.

The Prosvjeta collection presents the role of the strongest cultural and educational society of Serbs in Croatia. The association, in addition to the affirmation of Serbian culture and traditions, also sought to enhance the political status of the Serbian people in the Socialist Republic of Croatia (SRC). Therefore, its actions were characterized as contrary to the regime and the association was at first marginalized and then terminated.

Rezső Szabó is a Hungarian lawyer and politician from Slovakia. His personal collection contains documents dealing with policies toward the Hungarian minority in Czechoslovakia including issues of culture and education in the languages of the minority. These documents are mostly from the time when Szabó was Secretary of the Hungarian Cultural Union CSEMADOK (1954-1969) and the time when he sat in the Czechoslovak Federal Assembly (1969-1971). The collection contains documents related to Szabó’s activities in 1968, when he was one of the activists who outlined requirements about reforms concerning the rights of minorities in Czechoslovakia. These documents are mainly bill drafts and laws concerning the problems of the Hungarian minority. The collection also contains a recording of a long interview with Szabó made in 2004.