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András Stark (1948-) is a doctor, psychiatrist, and professor. Together with Ferenc Erős, he led the interview project on the experiences of second-generation Holocaust survivors.

Stark completed his PhD at the medical university. He graduated in 1972. He is an expert on psychoanalysis. In 1979, Stark and Erős decided that they would do interviews with second-generation Holocaust survivors. The idea was prompted primarily by their family histories. Their Jewish origins played a major role in their scientific interests. As a psychiatrist, Stark dealt with the Holocaust and traumas which ensued from the suppression of the memories of these traumas within families.

Judith Kestenberg’s study on the children of people who had suffered persecution was an inspiration for them. They planned similar research. Initially, they held lectures in a professional circle about their conclusions. The first public presentation was organized as part of an event held by the Hungarian Psychiatric Society in 1983. (The title of the presentation was “A társadalmi diszkrimináció hosszantartó hatása a személyiségfejlődésre: A holocaust utáni nemzedékek identitásproblémái” or “The Effect of Social Discrimination on Personality Development: Identity Problems of the Generations after the Holocaust.”) Some of their colleagues were disgusted by this topic, and they contended that it was not “relevant” and would foster the Antisemitism.

Iryna Stasiv-Kalynets (b. 1940-d. 2012 in Lviv)  was a poet, philologist, member of the „sixtiers” and human rights movements in Ukraine. She was arrested in 1972 along with much of her social circle for „anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation.” Stasiv-Kalynets studied Slavic languages and literatures at university in Lviv in 1959-1964, after which she worked as a teacher and librarian in local schools. In 1969, she began teaching Ukrainian language and literature at Lviv Polytechnic Institute and also published a number of children’s books at this time. As a result of Khrushchev’s thaw, she took great interest in developments in neighboring Hungary and Czechoslovakia, which radicalized her. In 1970, she and nine others signed a letter of protest in response to the arrest of historian Valentyn Moroz, after which she was fired from her job. The following year she and her husband declared their public support for the microbiologist Nina Strokata, a human rights activist arrested in 1971.

After her own arrest in 1972, along with many of her other dissident compatriots, nearly 100 of her students were interrogated by the KGB, of which only a handful submitted denunciations against her. She was sentenced to 6 years of imprisonment in a forced labor camp and three years of exile in the far reaches of Siberia, in the village of Undino-Poselye, Zabaykalsky Krai, Russia (with her husband Ihor Kalynets, who was arrested and sentenced to a similarly long imprisonment). Her sentence was not commuted despite exhortations on her behalf that this verdict was far too harsh a response for writing non-conformist poetry. 

After her release in 1981, she returned to Lviv, where she returned to active life but struggled to find employment. She was finally able to find work after the intervention of the KGB itself, as a cashier and secretary in the regional teachers’ center. In 1987, Stasiv-Kalynets played an active role in reviving cultural and civic life in Lviv. In November, she and her husband Ihor were among the founders of a Ukrainian association for an independent creative intelligentsia. She gave public lectures about Vasyl Stus, worked with independent cultural journals, helped found the Ukrainian branch of “Memorial” as well as the Popular Movement of Ukraine (Rukh), which was part of the republic’s democratic opposition.

Stasiv-Kalynets was also involved in the revival of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church (UGCC). In 1988-1989, she participated in many rallies and meetings, many of which had not been sanctioned by the authorities. She was detained on several occasions as a result. Her participation in a rally on January 22, 1989, which marked the 80^th anniversary of the 1919 declaration of an independent Western Ukrainian National Republic, resulted in 10 days of custodial arrest. She was also detained in February 1989, when Mikhail Gorbachev visited Lviv.

In 1990, Stasiv-Kalynets was elected a deputy to Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada. In May 1990, she became head of the Lviv Regional Department of Education, playing an active role in school reform.  In 1992-1994, Stasiv-Kalynets served as chairperson of a parliamentary subcommittee on education. Prior to her death in 2012, she also played an active role in making the Prison on Lonskogo St. a museum-memorial for all the inmates incarcerated there. 

A leading Romanian intellectual of Jewish origin, Nicolae Steinhardt (1912–1989) came to be known mostly for his “literary testament,” an autobiographical volume which focuses on his conversion to the Christian Orthodox faith while imprisoned under communism. Published after 1989 as Jurnalul fericirii (Diary of blissfulness), this book epitomises the idea of “resistance through culture,” a post-1989 definition of the pre-1989 mainstream intellectual reaction to the system of values imposed by the communist regime in Romania (C. Petrescu 2008). Steinhardt was a member of the so-called generation of 1927, which comprised the most prominent intellectuals of the interwar period. Although he held a doctoral degree in legal studies, he nonetheless dedicated himself to cultural activities. As a Jew, he suffered from the wave of anti-Semitic persecutions perpetrated by the extreme right Iron Guard party and the military dictatorship of Marshal Ion Antonescu. Consequently, he lost his job as editor of the state-sponsored Revista Fundațiilor Regale in 1940. Under the communist regime, Steinhardt was a political prisoner for five years following a trial which the communist authorities staged against a group of prominent intellectuals from his generation during the wave of repression unleashed in the aftermath of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. 

It was not because he really belonged to an opposition group that Steinhardt was imprisoned; the accused in this trial were an informal group of highly educated and cosmopolitan intellectuals, who were transformed in the vision of the Securitate into an alleged “hostile group.” Taking his Jewish origin into consideration, the secret police summoned him to testify against his Romanian friends and fellow intellectuals, for the intention of the secret police was to incriminate them as “mystic and legionary [i.e., fascist] intellectuals.” Because he refused, the Securitate put him alongside the others and set up a trial against the entire group, which later came to be known as the Noica–Pillat trial, after the names of two leading personalities in the group. Due to the prestige and number of those involved, this event was the most notorious persecution perpetrated under communism against non-political intellectuals (Tănase 1997). Sentenced to thirteen years of imprisonment, Steinhardt went through the worst prisons in communist Romania, such as Jilava, Aiud, and Gherla.

A secularised Jew, Steinhardt converted to Christianity in 1960 in the Jilava prison, following an ad-hoc religious service performed by several of his inmates who were clergy of various Christian denominations, including Roman Catholic, Greek Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox. It is worth emphasising the striking similarity between Steinhardt’s baptism and the widely known conversion to Catholicism of a Polish intellectual of Jewish origin, Aleksander Wat, while in a Soviet prison (Wat 1988). Steinhardt was released before completing his sentence, with the general amnesty of political prisoners in 1964. He resumed his literary activities as journalist and translator, managed to publish several books, and re-established himself as a reputed intellectual. A turning point in Steinhardt’s life occurred in 1980, when he became an Orthodox monk at the secluded monastery of Rohia in the northern region of Maramureș. Even there, he was continuously kept under surveillance by the Securitate. However, he dedicated himself to the writing of his secret memoirs, which he considered his literary testament. In spite of the constant surveillance, Steinhardt managed to transmit his extraordinary life experience, in particular that of his imprisonment and conversion to Christianity, through the manuscript entitled Jurnalul fericirii (Diary of blissfulness). He stubbornly rewrote the manuscript each time the secret police confiscated the version he was working on. He even managed to send some copies abroad to RFE, which broadcast them back to Romania. His funeral in March 1989, which was attended by some of the most prominent intellectuals in Romania, was also monitored by Securitate employees.

Nicolae Steinhardt was not involved directly in the making of any collection, but he is the author of one featured item from the Confiscated Manuscripts at CNSAS Collection, which seems to be a condensed version of his Jurnalul fericirii. This non-ad-hoc collection founded by the Securitate includes today only a copy, for the original was returned to his heirs in 2002, in accordance with the 2001 decision of the then Collegium of CNSAS to return confiscated materials upon request. Besides this abridged version of his memoirs and that which reached RFE, at least two other versions survived communism to be published. Before his death, Steinhardt was able to pass a version to a friend and to hide another in the monastery. Steinhardt’s memoirs became extremely influential during the time of ideological decay in the late 1980s for three reasons: (1) the author spoke about the solace of religion and proposed a different vision of the world than that based on the atheist communist system of values; (2) some versions of the manuscript, which was intended to be Steinhardt’s intellectual testament, circulated as a kind of samizdat in the intellectual circles close to the author; (3) the message of the memoirs was widely spread among Romanians via RFE. Thus, Jurnalul fericirii became after 1989 not only a bestseller, but also the epitome of what Romanian intellectuals name “resistance through culture” and claim – rightfully or not – to have been the only possible reaction against the Ceaușescu regime, which the powerful and ubiquitous Securitate defended until 1989 (C. Petrescu 2008).

Post-conceptual artist Mladen Stilinović was born in Belgrade in 1947 and spent most of his life in Zagreb. As a young man he left high school and opted for self-education. He was interested in history, theatre and the visual arts, and he wrote poetry. From 1969 to 1976, his primary field of interest was experimental film. He was a member of the Group of Six Authors (1975-1981) together with Vlado Martek, Boris Demur, Željko Jerman, Sven Stilinović and Fedor Vučemilović. He was one of the co-founders of the Podroom Gallery, and ran the Extended Media Gallery in Zagreb from 1981 to 1991. He cooperated with the IRWIN group on the Retroavangarde project in 1994.

Stilinović's artwork ˝Work is a Disease. Karl Marx˝ was censored by the Party in 1981. It was exhibited at the Youth Salon, and removed by Party. But he exhibited it again in the group exhibition in the SC Gallery three months later. “Work” aroused great interest among experts, and Stilinović described it as follows: ˝When I started making artworks about work, like ‘Work is Disease (Karl Marx)’ (1981), in Yugoslavia it was interpreted in two ways: the first was that it was an actual Karl Marx citation; the second interpretation argued that I signed it as Karl Marx, which was true. I was making fun. During the socialist regime, anything signed by Karl Marx was taken as an absolute truth. So I was being ironic˝ (link: http://www.flashartonline.com/article/mladen-stilnovic/).

Stilinović's artistic work includes collages, photographs, artist's books, paintings, installations, actions, films and video features. He continued the tradition of avant-garde art by advocating the social dimension of art. Consequently, he was critical of the artistic establishment of the 1970s and 1980s, and critically, cynically and ironically commented on social reality. His most renowned artistic cycle is the "Exploitation of the Dead", with other recognizable works such as "Money", "Death" and "Economy".

Stipčević attended primary school and the classics gymnasium in Zadar, and graduated with a degree in archaeology from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science in Zagreb in 1954. He obtained his Ph.D. from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science in Zadar in 1977. He worked at the National and University Library (1957-1974), and was a senior lecturer at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science in Priština (1970-1973), the head of the Library of the Yugoslav Academy of Arts and Science (1974-1983), the editor-in-chief of the Croatian Biographical Lexicon (1983-1989, volume 2) at the Yugoslav Lexicography Institute, and a professor at the Department of Librarianship at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science in Zagreb (1987-1997). His academic interests included the culture of the Illyrians, ancient bibliography and encyclopaedism, and the history and sociology of books. He was a member of the Academy of Arts and Science in Kosovo.

As a social historian of books, Aleksandar Stipčević (1930–2015) was among very few Croatian scholars who approached the topic of censorship from the scholarly standpoint after the fall of communism in 1990. He wrote several books about it, both theoretical-historical as well as biographical, in which he related his own experience of censorship during the Yugoslav socialist period (e.g. On the Perfect Censor, Censorship in Libraries, The Story about the Biographical Lexicon). His personal collection, consisting of 66 archival boxes when handed over by his widow to the Croatian State Archives in 2015, reflects this interest, because the materials in 17 boxes are devoted to the topic of the “general history of censorship.” As a librarian, Stipčević was especially interested in different forms of censorship, and, as a hobby, began taking clippings from different types of journals and periodicals, both national and international. Eventually, this passion for collecting information enabled him to write several books on the topic of censorship.

Stipčević was interested in censorship as a means of repression because he experienced its violence on several occasions. In 1944, when Partisan troops liberated Zadar they purged libraries of “fascist” books, which were burnt just because they were written in Italian. In 1955, libraries had to be purged of books by Party dissident Milovan Đilas (1911-1995). At that time, Stipčević was serving in the Yugoslav People’s Army and was ordered to remove Đilas’ books (if he was the author) from the military library and to cut his pictures out of books by other authors. Finally, he experienced the force of censorship when he became editor-in-chief of the second volume of the Croatian Biographical Lexicon in 1983. The previous, first volume was withdrawn from bookshops at the request of certain Party members and members of the World War II veterans association due to alleged nationalism and non-Marxist standpoints. This is why a great deal of material in his folders is dedicated to the topic of “purges” in libraries, which he metaphorically called “the castration of books” (Stipčević 2008: 345).

According to his wife, Aleksandar Stipčević was a “harmless anti-communist”; he did not call for revolution, he opposed the communist ideology only in his head, and more openly after 1990, which is apparent in his books. He was never a member of the Communist Party. However, a direct conflict emerged during his editorship of the second volume of the Croatian Biographical Lexicon, when in 1985 the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Croatia held a conference dedicated to the ideological situation in Croatia. The speakers identified the penetration of nationalism in culture and science, with the Croatian Biographical Lexicon as the most prominent example, wherein Croatian national history was interpreted without a Marxist approach. It was not enough to say that the edition was scholarly, for its Marxist orientation had to be specifically emphasised.

In 1989 Stipčević applied for a job at the Department of Librarianship at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science, where each candidate had to have ”moral and political character.” In other words, he/she had to be a sympathiser of communism, but the dean accepted Stipčević’s application, although obviously lacking these qualifications, because of his contributions to Croatian culture.

Aleksandar Stipčević was against the suppression of all manner of freedom under any regime (not only communism, but also fascism, because he was born in Zadar in 1930 and lived his youth under the Fascist rule.) He condemned both communism and fascism because they were both totalitarian regimes. Even so communism, especially the Stalinist type, was in his view even worse because Stalin killed his own people (Interview with Stipčević, Anđelka).