COURAGE

savienojot kolekcijas

Located at the Polish Library of the Polish Social and Cultural Association (POSK) in London, Polish Underground Publications collection contains serials, books, and brochures published clandestinely by Polish opposition groups from 1976 to 1990. This is one of the largest collections of Polish independent publications worldwide and outside Poland. It documents the pluralistic character of anti-communist opposition in People's Poland and testifies to the richness, diversity, and magnitude of underground publishing in People's Poland. 

The collection Printer Krumpholc contains documents published during 1970s and 1980s on a secret press located in the basement of the home of Jan Krumpholc (1927-2010) in Radíkov, near the Czech city Olomouc. Mr. Krumpholc was a political prisoner, and his collection therefore offers valuable insight into the work of a persecuted oppositional figure. In 1950 he was sentenced in a show trial to imprisonment for 25 years for the offence of treason and being an enemy of the Republic. In 1969 he was released due to an amnesty. His secret press had a manual duplicating machine, on which religious and other prohibited literary works were copied. Various other printed papers were copied as well, including those dealing with violations of fundamental human rights in Czechoslovakia.

The National Museum-Memorial to the Victims of Occupation “Prison on Lonskogo Street” has a small, but growing, archival collection. A detention facility used by the Polish police, the Nazi and Soviet occupational regimes, and lastly the KGB, this museum-memorial has a storied past. The building was used by regional state security services (SBU) as a prison until 1996. After the local community caught wind of a plan to allow developers to build on the site in 2006, activists mobilized to transform the prison into a site commemorating the thousands of prisoners executed by the NKVD in 1941 as the Red Army fled from advancing Nazi forces, and those incarcerated here in the decades that followed.

Curators have amassed 2,000 items since the museum’s opening in 2009. In addition to World War II propaganda from Nazi and Soviet forces, it holds the personal belongings of political prisoners and detainees—letters, personal documents, and samizdat publications used to prosecute dissidents, artists, and human rights activists in Lviv and its surrounding environs in the 1960s and 1970s. The latter is an ad hoc collection of about 50 items described in the rest of this entry, which includes embroidery, rosaries made out of bread, and other materials created by prisoners serving out lengthy sentences in Siberian labour camps under Brezhnev. Situated within the larger context of the museum-memorial’s holdings, these materials about Lviv’s dissidents is important for understanding the Soviet Union’s treatment of its most intransigent opponents well into the Brezhnev era.

This collection is one of the most important samizdat collections in Hungary. The Museum's Library and Archive started systematically to collect samizdat materials in the 1980s. The materials were kept in closed stacks not available to the public until 1989. The Museum held one of the first exhibitions on samizdat in Hungary after the change of regimes.