COURAGE

Свързване на колекции

Edward Brejnik was the first person employed in the Archive in the very beginning of its functioning. It was his duty to gather all the documents dispersed in the "Solidarity" Trade Union's offices in one place. He started to organise the Archive in two small rooms, completely unfit to this purpose, and then he was able to negociate gradual improvement of Archive's working conditions. Brejnik worked on networking all the institutions and archives that disposed materials from 1980's in order to gather all the materials about the "Solidarity" Trade Union. His work was later continued by Stanisław Flis and other employees of the Archive.

Savo Brković (1906-1991) was a Montenegrin politician, a 'People's Hero' (the second highest military award in Yugoslavia awarded to individuals who distinguished themselves by extraordinary heroic deeds during the Second World War) and publicist. Brković was born to a poor family of farmers. In 1924, he became a member of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY), where he undertook various activities including youth organizing, writing for party newspapers, administrative work, and participating in partisan units, where he held a number of leadership positions, during the Second World War. For his military exploits, Brković received several Yugoslav honours including the Commemorative Medal of the Partisans of 1941 and the Order of the People's Hero.

In 1945, Brković was appointed head of the Department of Peoples’ Protection (Yugoslavia’s security agency between 1944 and 1946) for Montenegro, and in April 1946 he was appointed Minister of Internal Affairs in the first government of the People’s Republic of Montenegro. He served until December 31 of that year, after which he served as Minister of Justice and then Minister of Construction. Through the end of the 1940s, he maintained various prominent political positions in Montenegro.

In the post-war period, he continued journalistic work initiated during illegal party work, and he worked at the Pobjeda [Victory] newspaper. His publicist work consisted mainly of writings about the history of Montenegro.

In 1974, Brković published the book O postanku i razvoju crnogorske nacije [On the Rise and Development of the Montenegrin Nation], in which he attempted to explain the ethnic origin of Montenegrins. This book led to suspicion that he was a Montenegrin nationalist, and afterwards he began to distance himself from the League of Communists of Yugoslavia. Nevertheless, he very much considered himself to be a communist.

In 1988, Brković published the book Etnogenezofobija (Fear of Ethnogenesis), which contained a set of theses developed from his first book, and open criticism of Greater Serbia nationalism, which at the time was being increasingly propagated by Serbian communist leaders and intellectuals. As a result, Savo Brković was expelled from the League of Communists of Yugoslavia and publicly denounced for Montenegrin nationalism.

Jenő Brogyányi was born in 1949 in Linz, Austria to Hungarian parents from Bratislava, Slovakia. He was two years old when his parents emigrated to the United States. After he had earned a degree in philosophy at New York University and then in architecture at the Cooper Union, he took up stage design. While he was working as a critic and translator, he also founded the Threshold Theater Company, a multi-lingual theatrical company putting Hungarian plays on stage in New York. His activities as a translator of poetic works at Columbia University were widely acknowledged at the international level, both in the form of prizes and in requests to write comprehensive basic works. Among other things, he translated the drama trilogy by András Sütő into English. He is the cofounder of the Committee for Human Rights in Romania. At HHRF he was responsible for being in ongoing contact with the press and for preparing the background materials for the advocacy activities.

Andrzej Brzozowski was a Polish film director and the head of the Artistic Board of the Warsaw Documentary Film Studio, as well as a long-time academic teacher at the Directing Department of the State Film School in Łódź. 
He directed the first Polish documentary on jazz - "The Jazz Conversations" (1957). His most appreciated productions include "This is an egg" (1966), "The Archeology" (1967), "An when king went to war" (1971) and "The 10 first days" (1973). Brzozowski directed also the short film "By the railroad" (1964), inspired by Zofia Nałkowska's "Medallions".

Pavel Brázda was a Czech artist. In 1945 he began to study the history of art and philosophy at the Faculty of Arts in Brno. However, after two semesters he left his studies. He continued to study at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. However, he was expelled from this academy due to his lack of interest. In 1947 he was enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts, where he met his future wife, the artist Věra Nováková. After three semesters they both had to leave the academy as a result of political purges. However, he was able to return to this academy in 1950. Two years later, he successfully finished his studies. After graduating, he worked as a professional artist, but, a few exceptions aside, without the opportunity to exhibit his works officially. His first solo exhibition took place in 1967. From 1971, Pavel Brázda and his wife Věra Nováková exhibited their paintings unofficially on a staircase in the villa of their friend Zdeněk Neubauer, where philosophical underground seminars, including lectures by the philosopher Jan Patočka, were regularly held. These seminars were also attended by Jiří Němec, Věra Jirousová and Martin Palouš. During “Normalization”, Brázda’s situation worsened. From 1977, he worked as a stoker for ten years before his retirement. After the Velvet Revolution he had a number of exhibitions (solo or joint with his wife) and was awarded the Revolver Revue Prize (1991), and the prize “Personality of the Year” for the most outstanding artistic work (2006).

Existential feelings and imaginative realism resonate in Brázda’s work. Although  he was outside of the cultural trends of the era for most of his artistic period, he was influenced by surrealism. In the 1940s he transformed surrealism into his own style - hominism or “surrealism for the poor”, as he called it. His pictures were inspired by the everyday life of ordinary people into which magical moments entered. From the 1960s, he turned to experimentation and creating structural images. In the following decades, distinctive colours became his distinctive expression - especially bright red, yellow, and blue.