COURAGE

savienojot kolekcijas

The collection is illustrative for the documentation work that lay behind the broadcasting activities of two prominent members of the Romanian exile community in Paris who worked with Radio Free Europe (RFE), Monica Lovinescu and Virgil Ierunca.  Their programmes focused mainly on presenting the cases of dissidents in the then Soviet Bloc. The need to understand the dissidence phenomenon and the main ideas behind its criticism of the communist regimes required diverse readings from different subject areas. Thus, the Monica Lovinescu and Virgil Ierunca Collection in Oradea testifies to the interest of its creators in subjects relating more or less to cultural opposition in the fields of literature, philosophy, sociology, history, art, and religion.

The collection belonging to the Memorial to the Revolution of 16–22 December 1989 in Timişoara brings a distinct and quite remarkable civic and ethical dimension to the institutionalization of the memory of the recent past of Romania. The monuments, exhibition spaces, objects, documents, photographs, and personal testimonies included in this collection illustrate the authenticity of the popular revolt that began in the city of Timișoara. To be more precise, the collection illustrates both the huge scale of the armed repression in those days and the extraordinary citizen resistance that the authorities were faced with in this key city for the fall of communism in Romania. The Memorial also includes a research centre and a publishing house, ensuring that there is constant scholarly and editorial activity aimed at developing the potential of the historical resource that it administers.

The Memory of Nations is an extensive online collection of the memories of witnesses, which is being developed throughout Europe by individuals, organizations, schools and institutions. It preserves and makes available the collections of memories of witnesses who have agreed that their testimony should serve to explore modern history and be publicly accessible. The collection includes testimonies of communism resistance, holocaust survival, artists of alternative culture and underground and many others.

The Mihnea Berindei Collection stored at the library of the A.D. Xenopol Institute of History of the Romanian Academy in Iași comprises the founder’s personal library. It consists of two major parts. First, it includes almost two thousand books, of which over a hundred are directly relevant for the history of the communist regimes in Romania and the neighbouring countries. These publications also reflect Berindei’s interest in human rights issues in communist Eastern Europe and the USSR. Second, it features a substantial sample of periodicals (magazines and journals), mostly published in exile and dealing with Eastern and Central Europe during the communist era. Mihnea Berindei donated his library to the A.D. Xenopol Institute of History in Iași shortly before his death, in 2016. This collection is significant due to its focus on the publications and activities of the Romanian exile community in the West. It also emphasises its founder’s abiding interest in the history and political trajectories of the East European communist regimes.