COURAGE

łączymy kolekcje

In September 2015, UMA curator Aniza Kraus attended a conference at the Library of Congress featuring Ukrainian culture. Congresswoman Marci Kaptur was the keynote speaker and one of the presenters was Jaime Monllor, the international outreach officer for the USHMM. At the conference Monllor indicated that one of the Holocaust Museum’s collection goals is documenting non-Jewish victims of persecution by the Nazis and their collaborators, with a particular interest in Ukraine. The UMA invited Monllor to come to Cleveland to see their DP camp collection. He brought three colleagues with him May 2016 to assess the collection. Impressed by what they saw, the USHMM came up with a grant for digitizing Ukrainian DP camp serials, rare published victims’ memoirs and of other related personal paper collections. Phase 1 was completed in February 2017, with support from Archival Data Systems (AIS) based in Kyiv. The parameters of Phase 2 are currently being discussed. Deepening cooperation between the USHMM and the UMA should not only provide scholars with the necessary resources to address understudied dimensions of the Holocaust and mass migration after WWII, it should also provide a more robust framework for understanding the implications of the Soviet-Nazi alliance of 1939 and how that shaped perspectives on and opposition to communism.   

In autumn of 2017 the Németh László Public Library heard about the existence of a volume of Galyasi’s typescripted poems. The volume was kept by the museum and is still being kept there. The volume, which included several elements that were unknown. The Library decided to publish the unknown poems and completed it with others. In April 2018 the Németh László Public Library competed for subsidy of National Cultural Found of Hungary. Dezső Béres, Ágnes Képiró and Attila Imre Kovács have been writing essays accompanying the poems.

In the period from 17 November 2017 to 31 January 2018, BCU Cluj-Napoca held the exhibition “Romania’s Royal Family: Testimonies from the Collections of Lucian Blaga Central University Library.” The exhibition displayed in the reading room of the Special Collections Department at BCU Cluj-Napoca photos, periodicals, brochures, and correspondence related to the Romania’s royal family from the collections that are in the custody of the institution. Among these items there were several documents from the Raţiu–Tilea Archives of the Romanian Exile Collection. Both Ion Raţiu and Viorel V. Tilea collected a large number of items related to the activities of the royal family in exile, including personal correspondence with King Michael of Romania. Due to the latter’s death on 5 December 2017, the exhibition also acquired a commemorative significance.