COURAGE

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Since its establishment in 1967, the Hanns Seidel Foundation has assumed the mission of supporting the “democratic and civic education of the German people on Christian foundations,” to quote its statutes. It was named after the Bavarian prime minister and chairman of the Christian-Social Union, who was active in Bavarian and German politics from the first years after WWII until his untimely death in 1961. The work of the Hanns Seidel Foundation is guided by the idea that democracy needs political education, which represented a top priority in the postwar Federal Republic of Germany. Ever since its beginnings, the foundation has expanded its activities throughout the entire world, under the motto “in the service of democracy, peace, and development.” After the collapse of communism in East-Central Europe, the foundation involved itself in the process of democratic consolidation and European integration by establishing branches in countries such as the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria. It has also supported the countries of the ex-Yugoslav space in their efforts to meet the criteria for European integration. In Romania, the Hanns Seidel Foundation has been supporting institutional reforms and civil society projects since 1992. For more on this, see  https://www.hss.de/en/;  http://www.hss.ro/.

In the 1970s, the first representatives of the political and cultural opposition to the Soviet Union came to the West and, above all, to France. Most of them went through communist jails, labour camps, were abused psychologically, subjected to persecution or bullying from the police. Their endeavour in exile was to continue with the struggle against totalitarianism, repression and the constant violations of human rights. It was their determination that brought them to be amongst the members of the Czechoslovak emigration, and Pavel Tigrid paid them great attention and gave them a background in their Redaction Testimonies.

Pavel Tigrid and his wife prepared to cooperate with their Russian friends in Paris in November 1974 at a Russian-Czechoslovakian conference. At the meeting, Ivana Tigridová initiated the establishment of an organisation that would coordinate human rights activities in different parts of the world and cooperate with international human rights and civil liberty organisations in Eastern Europe. The ten-member committee was elected and Ivana Tigridová became the committee's honorary secretary. The organisation, named Help and Action, was headquartered in Paris's Testimonies Redaction. The Committee Secretariat was managed by volunteers and funded by private donations.

 Since then, members of the Help and Action Coordination Committee have been planning and coordinating activities to defend human and civil rights in their countries. Ivana Tigridova, in cooperation with her husband, had been functioning since the establishment of the committee.

 The purpose of the committee's work was to mobilise the public and, with its help, to reach out to governments and international organisations in the West, and then to exert pressure on the representatives of the Communist countries, where the rights and freedoms of their citizens were suppressed. In support of persecuted Czechoslovak and Soviet citizens, the Help and Action organised demonstrations, petitions, public debates and press conferences. The main objective of these campaigns was to achieve the release of political prisoners or at least to mitigate their prison conditions. Moral support was also provided to the prisoners, which was very important to them. They knew that their activities, despite the numerous repressions of the regime, made sense. At the same time, help was also organised for their families. Ivana Tigridová published a bulletin of the same name, which informed the public about the human rights situation in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and other Eastern Bloc countries.

Help and Action was active until the fall of the Iron Curtain, which meant the defeat of totalitarian regimes in the Soviet bloc countries.