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John I. (Ivan) Pintar was born in Chicago in 1904. As a commercial entrepreneur in 1933, he moved to Zagreb, where he worked as the manager of an American chemical company since 1937. The communist regime in Yugoslavia arrested him in the autumn of 1946 and in early 1947 sentenced him to death in a show trial under charges of being an American spy. Thanks to the mediation of US authorities and the US embassy in Belgrade, his sentence was reduced to 20 years in prison with forced labour. After four years spent in jail in Lepoglava and Srijemska Mitrovica, and after the persistent efforts of the US Department of State and US Ambassador to Belgrade George V. Allen, he was released on December 4, 1950. Upon his return to the United States, he wrote and published a book on the communist regime and his prison experience entitled Four Years in Tito's Hell. He dedicated the book, published in Buenos Aires in 1954, in which he critically spoke about the Communist regime in Yugoslavia, to all victims of communism.

Lucian Pintilie (1933–2018) was a Romanian theatre and cinema director and screenplay writer. He was born on 9 November 1933 in Taruntino, now part of Ukraine. In 1940 his family felt Taruntino and thus, the young Pintilie finished his primary and secondary education in Romania. In 1951 he enrolled in the theatre directing department of the Ion Luca Caragiale Institute of Theatre and Film in Bucharest,. During his first year as a student, the Securitate contacted Pintilie and out of a “spirit of adventure” he agreed to become its “unqualified informer.” When Pintilie realised that he could not perform the assigned task of informer, he started to write reports containing “ridiculous denunciations” and complaints about “administrative shortcomings” in the student dormitories. In the same year of 1952 his father was arrested for eight months for political reasons (his membership of the Iron Guard). After his father’s release from prison, Pintilie put an end to his collaboration with the Securitate by courageously stating in his last meeting with the Securitate officer that: “I am a great director and never again I will dealt with such activities that can distract me from my creative work” (Pintilie 2003, 365–366). Following graduation Lucian Pintilie worked for a short period of time as a director at the Army Theatre and at TVR (Romanian acronym for Romanian National Television). Due to his rebellious spirit and frequent conflicts with the management, he lost his position at the Army Theatre. In November 1959 he also got fired from TVR as he refused to direct a show dedicated to the celebration of the October Revolution. Lucian Pintlie’s career was saved by Liviu Ciulei, another well-known Romanian director, who invited him to work as a director at Lucia Sturdza Bulandra Theatre. Here he directed a series of productions, such as Maxim Gorky’s Children of the Sun (Copiii soarelui, 1961), Teodor Mazilu‘s Proști sub clar de lună (Fools by moonlight, 1962), George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra (Cezar și Cleopatra, 1963), Max Frisch’s The Arsonists (Biederman și incendiatorii, 1964), William Saroyan’s My Heart’s in the Highlands (Inima mea este pe înălțimi, 1964), I. L. Caragiale’s D’ale carnavalului (Carnival scenes, 1966), and A. Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (Livada cu vișini, 1967). At the same time, Liviu Ciulei included Pintilie in his shooting team for the film Valurile Dunării (The waves of the Danube) and he also worked as principal assistant of another great director, Victor Ilie, in two of his film projects. In 1965 Pintilie was given a UNESCO scholarship for film directing in France and Italy and this opportunity opened the way for his career as a film director. His first movie Duminică la șase (Sunday at six, 1965) was received with mixed reactions as Pintilie intentionally downplayed the communist underground resistance movement during World War II in favour of the a love story between the two protagonists of the film (Caranfil 2013, 195; Nasta 2013, 86–87). The series of his banned artistic works began with the film Reconstituirea (Reenactment, 1969) and continued with his adaptation of Gogol’s play The Inspector General (Revizorul) in 1971 at the Lucia Sturdza Bulandra Theatre. Because he constantly refused any compromise with the communist censorship, Lucian Pintilie was forced from 1973 to work abroad as a film and theatre director. At the same time, he enjoyed a privileged status as he could travel freely to Europe and United States and return to Romania whenever he wanted. Due to his international success the communist authorities lured him with a new film project after an adaptation of Ioan Luca Caragiale’s play D’ale Carnavalului (Carnival scenes), which he had previously staged successfully for the Bulandra Theatre. The film De ce trag clopotele, Mitică? (Why are the bells ringing, Mitică?) was not passed for screening and it was shelved until August 1990, when it had its premiere. After the banning of his film, Pintilie continued to work abroad, returning frequently to Romania to collect information about Romanian dissident intellectuals, such as Dorin Tudoran, which he passed on to the Romanian desk of Radio Free Europe. After the fall of the communist regime, Lucian Pintilie became the head of the Film Studio subordinated to the Ministry of Culture and focused his carrier on film directing. As a result, between 1992 and 2002 he shot a film every two or three years with the help of Marin Karmitz, a Romanian-born emigrant producer/distributor from France. His successful film productions included Balanța (The oak) in 1992, O vară de neuitat (An unforgettable summer) in 1994, Prea târziu (Too late) in 1996, Terminus Paradis (Next stop paradise) in 1998, După amiaza unui torționar (The afternoon of a torturer) in 2001, Niki Ardelean, colonel în rezervă (Niki and Flo) in 2003 and Tertium non datur in 2006. A highly awarded film director, Lucian Pintilie supported his younger colleagues in Romanian New Wave Cinema, such as Stere Gulea, Nae Caranfil, Mircea Danieluc, Nicolae Mărgineanu and Cristi Puiu (Nasta 98–120; Rîpeanu 2013, 440–441). He passed away in 2018 at the age of 84.

Stanislav Pitaš is a Czech signatory of Charter 77, political activist, organiser of concerts and representative of the East Bohemian underground. He has worked as a blue-collar worker for most of his life. He maintained contact with the dissidents around Václav Havel and with the underground community in Vísca near Chomutov, East Bohemia. He distributed the samizdat periodicals “Vokno” and “Voknoviny”. During his travels in Poland, he collaborated with Solidarity and actively supported the movement. In the 1980s, he moved to Broumov, North Bohemia, where he organised underground concerts and happenings. As a signatory of Charter 77, he was under supervision and was the target of intimidation by the State Security (StB). He was imprisoned three times between 1985 and 1989. In 1985 this was for allegedly ridiculing the president of Czechoslovakia when he and his friends created a satirical collage of Gustav Husák. On his way to a demonstration in Prague on 28 October 1988, he refused to follow the orders of StB officers, and instead passively lay down and was arrested. His subsequent complaint served as a pretext for the StB to accuse Pitaš of assaulting an officer. In 1989 he was imprisoned for the alleged theft of socialist property. He requested that his sentence be suspended because his mother was seriously ill; his request was not granted, despite Pitaš’s hunger strike. His mother died without Pitaš being able to pay his last respects. Before her death, she sent a letter to the prosecution office in Náchod, where she wrote that she was proud of how she had raised her son. All Pitaš’s trials were followed and reported by the Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Prosecuted (VONS). Pitaš was released following a general amnesty in December 1989. After the Velvet Revolution, he was active within prison and police vetting committees. He organises concerts and other events in Šonov and Broumov.

Petr Pithart was born on 2 January 1941 in Kladno. His father, Vilém Pithart, was a lawyer and a member of the pre-war Communist Party, imprisoned by the Nazis in Theresienstadt in 1944 and later in Dachau. The Pithart family moved to Prague in 1946. Petr Pithart studied at grammar school and Charles University’s Law Faculty. He became a member of the Communist Party during his studies. He worked as an assistant professor at the faculty between 1962 and 1971 and published in Literární noviny from the middle of the 1960s. He resigned his membership of the Communist Party in September 1968. In 1969, Pithart and his family relocated to Oxford, where he had been granted a scholarship, but returned to Czechoslovakia in autumn the same year, having been called upon by the Czechoslovak government. He was dismissed from the university in 1971 and worked on hydraulic structures in South Bohemia. Between 1973 and 1977, while working as a business lawyer in Prague, he co-organised the smuggling of samizdat and exile literature together with Jan Kavan, who lived in London. After signing Charter 77 in 1977, he handed the organisation over to Jiřina Šiklová. As a signatory of Charter 77, he was immediately dismissed from his job. He worked as a night guard, packaging controller and librarian. His writings were published as samizdat volumes, and some of them were signed under his pen name J. Sládeček.

Petr Placák is a Czech journalist, historian and significant political activist before 1989. He is the son of Bedřich Placák, a spokesman for Charter 77. He played clarinet in the underground music group “The Plastic People of the Universe” (PPU) between 1982 and 1986. He was kept under surveillance by the State Security (StB), worked as a blue-collar worker and published samizdat volumes. In 1988, he founded the opposition initiative “České děti” (Czech Children) – the initiative presented a monarchist programme, shocking at that time, and various forms of humorous protests. Placák was one of the organisers of the demonstrations commemorating the 20th anniversary of the occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968. He was sentenced to a suspended sentence because of his activities during “Palach’s week” in January 1989 (a week-long succession of demonstrations to commemorate Jan Palach’s self-immolation in 1969). Between 1989 and 1990, he was active in the Coordination Centre of the Civic Forum. Placák co-founded the monarchist movement “Koruna česká” (Czech Crown) after 1989. He works as a journalist and is editor-in-chief of the cultural and social revue “Babylon”. His essay “Fízl” (2007) reflects on his personal experience of StB repression and examines the psychological aspects of life under a dictatorship, which was awarded the Czech “Magnesia Litera” book prize in 2008. He has published some of his works under his pen name Petr Zmrzlík.