Before 1990 Helmut Koenig was a voluntary activist of Hungarian minority protection, based in Budapest, then on a government employee charged with the affaires of humanitarian and NGO supports provided for Hungarian communities over the borders.
From early 1980s his attention and readyness to help turned more and more towards the 2.2 million Hungarian minorities living mostly in the Transylvanian part of Romania. In autumn 1985 a group of young volunteers in Budapest, by accepting his proposal, established a conspirative organisation for regular transporting aid packages for the people in need, at first with the name ETE (Association for Aiding Transylvania), then with Transylvanian Caritas (Transcar). The initial group of some 40 people was soon enlarged to more than 200, smuggled for years great ammount of books, bibles, food, medicaments, cloths and hygienic products to the towns and villages of Transylvania, and also supported Romanian refugees fled to Hungary, and were forced to live as illegaly entered, hiding strangers with no home there. The Budapest home of Koenig family wih four children served not only as a depot of aiding materials and a regular meeting place for the members of ETE, but also as a safe asylum for shorter or longer time for the hiding refugees arrived from Romania. By transporting regularily most case in rucksacs the donations of Western charity organisations and the Hungarian emigrés in the West by 1989 ETE became the largest and the most active civilian charity network providing materal aid together with mental support for the people of Romania. Apart from that it also took an active part in saving the endangered Transylvanian cultural heritage. (See the campaigns of S.O.S. Transsylvania and Pro Domo Dei.)
In Spring 1990 the organisation was registered as “Transylvania Caritas Association”, and ever since it went on operating legally and publicly. Helmut Koenig in late 1993 up untill his retirement in 2010 took a job as a government employee at the Office of Over the Borders Hungarians, in charge with the affaires of humanitarian aid and support for minority NGOs. He is still holding the archival records of ETE and Transcar – a collection of cca 1,5 linear meters. In the year of 2000 he also prepared his dissertation by summing the history of the one-time Transylvanian aid mission for the John Wesley Theological College Social Worker Training Dept. (See some extracts attached.)
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Umiestnenie:
- Budapest, Hungary
Jan Hendrych is a Czech sculptor and painter. He was born into the family of the lawyer Jaroslav Hendrych and the sculptor Olga Hendrychová (Tobolková). From 1955–1961 he studied sculpture at the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague and then at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague from 1963–1966. At first, Hendrych dedicated himself to portraiture before turning towards figurative art. At the start of the 1960s, Hendrych was involved for a short period in structural abstraction, but he soon became a representative of the “new figuration”, for whom the human figure was the starting point of art. He first exhibited his sculptural work in Liberec in 1964 and his first solo exhibition was at the Gallery of Young Artists at Mánes in Prague in 1966. After 1969, Hendrych was prohibited from exhibiting and made a living restoring statutes. He was allowed to exhibit his work once more in 1988 at Prague City Gallery. During Normalization he dedicated himself mainly to the creation of female figures, in particular nudes. After 1990, he began teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague.
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Umiestnenie:
- Praha, Prague, Czech Republic
Károly Varga was born in Hosszúhetény on 7 October 1932. His mother was a midwife, his father worked in a mine. Károly Varga attended grammar school in Hosszúhetény and then in Pécsvárad. When he turned 10, he began studying at the Jesuit’s Pius Main Gymnasium in Pécs. After the nationalization of Church-based schools (1948), he was quickly expelled from school in 1949 because he did not clap to rhythm of the regime led by Mátyás Rákosi, the Communist dictator. For instance, he refused to sign a school petition demanding the arrest of Cardinal József Mindszenty. However, he graduated from the Nagy Lajos High School in Pécs in 1951 thanks to the support of the well-intentioned school director.
He graduated from the Academy of Pedagogy in Pécs in 1956. He became a Hungarian and later a German teacher. He already suffered from serious disease. He had tuberculosis, and his right lung was removed in 1959. He went to the Korányi Sanatorium in Budapest for treatment, where he met Borbála Varga (born in Szécsény). They married in July 1960. They started their lives together in Komló, which was a communist mining town. They had two sons: Péter Pius was born in 1961, Károly József in 1962. The boys graduated at the Pannonhalma Benedictine College.
The family had a difficult life in Komló. Károly Varga, as a Hungarian-German teacher, worked at the local Grammar School of Gesztenyés. Borbála Varga first got a job in the Surgical Department of the Town Hospital, but after the birth of their first son, she worked as a nurse until her retirement.
On the 7 June 1967, police captain Zsigmond Adrián and police major István Major searched Károly Varga’s home. They found and confiscated some hand-written translations from books including, writings by Belgian Jesuit monk Fernand Lelotte (“Man speaking with God,” “Worldview Orientation”) and the “White Rose” by Inge Scholl, which was about German youngsters who resisted Hitler’s regime. These writings were considered “dangerous” by the authorities. The police also seized 34 hand-written and typed letters and 5 books in German. Károly Varga was questioned as a suspect by the Political Office of the Baranya County Police Main Department on 7 June 1967, and he was indicted as a member in the case against László Bolváry. Bolváry was accused of having translated books from West Germany, which he had been typing and disseminating without permission since 1964.
Károly Vargha call for a short time, but his superiors ordered him to use his disability pension because of his illness, so he had to stop teaching in school. He supplemented his pitiful pension with money he earned by teaching German privately. His writings began to be published in 1968, at first in Új Ember (“New Man”) and then in Vigilia. At the suggestion of the chief editor, he used his birth-village’s name for differentiation and started to publish as Hetényi Varga Károly.
He was awarded the Sándor Petőfi Press Freedom Award by the Alliance of Hungarian Journalists on 15 March 2001. He had many research plans and dreams, but his acute illness defeated him and he died on 2 January 2002 in Pécs. He awarded the Pro Ecclesia Hungariae Award posthumously by the Hungarian Catholic Bishops’ Conference on 7 June 2007. He was awarded the Hungarian Heritage Award in September 2012.
A memorial plaque was unveiled on the wall of Hetényi’s former home at Pécsvárad in 2005. In 2012, a memorial tablet was put on the house in which he was born in Hosszúhetény. On the 5th anniversary of his death, the Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security, the Ödön Lénárd Common Foundation, and the Church Historical Institute of Pécs organized an academic memory conference dedicated to him.-
Umiestnenie:
- Pécs, Hungary
Zsuzsa Hetényi is Professor in Russian Studies at the Institute for Russian Studies at ELTE University, Budapest, where she started to work in 1983. She is a renowned translator of Russian literature. She is the daughter of the well-known reform economist at the State Office of Planning, István Hetényi, who played a key role in developing the so-called New Economic Mechanism in the late-1960s and became Minister of Finance in 1980. He was dismissed from this position by Kádár at the end of 1986. The same year Zsuzsa Hetényi published Bulgakov's Heart of a Dog in samizdat, translated in 1980.
Hetényi came from an Anglo-Saxon oriented middle class intellectual family. Her grandfather, Géza Hetényi was an eminent physician already in the 1930s, later member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, whose career was not broken in 1948 for he established good contacts with Soviet colleagues. His son, István Hetényi grew to be a leading economist who worked at the National Planning Bureau before taking the office of Minister of Finance. The success of the family did not coincide with a blind devotion to the communist cause: Zsuzsa Hetényi's mother, who joined the movement at a very young age before the Second World War, disappointed from politics at the time of the Rajk Trial in 1949, openly voiced her critical opinion and left the Socialist Party in 1956 that resulted her losing her job. Initially, Zsuzsa Hetényi enthusiastically joined the communist youth movement that she percieved as being detached from ideology at her school, but then refused to join the party when she finished high school in the early 1970s. As she pointed out in a published interview, the definite turning point for her was when in 1971 she read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962, also in Hungarian), and his GULAG-book in samizdat. This was revealing in the context of Hungarian politics as well. Notably, as Hetényi herself wrote about it in a retrospective essay commemorating the writer's death, the specific vocabulary of the camps was translated in consultation with a Hungarian ex-deportee of the "Hungarian GULAG", Recsk Labour Camp.
In high school Hetényi became increasingly involved in the scene that is today called alternative: visited the performances of the Orfeo Group, Péter Halász Apartment Theatre and submerged in Budapest nightlife. She considered György Konrád one of the greatest contemporary authors, so much so that she wrote an essay on A látogató (The Visitor, 1969) as university entry exam. She did so even though Konrád's novel was harshly criticized in the official Communist press. At Eötvös Loránd University, Hetényi's formative experience were Béla G. Németh's seminars that created a sharp contrast to other professor's classes. Németh, a Catholic and conservative, promoted a wide European perspective and highlighted a tradition of Hungarian literature that was diverging from the preferred canon of the Party's cultural policy.
As Hetényi remembered in the interview, she had contacts with several circles with a dissident ethos, but none of these let her deeply integrate. She experienced a great suspicion towards her. On the one hand, the literary scholar Iván Horváth's group distrusted her because of her father's political position that she found absurd for Horváth's father, Márton was a high official in the Party during Hungarian Stalinism of 1950s. On the other hand, the circle of Ádám Tábor and György Tatár that was formed on the basis of a newly discovered Jewish identity also kept her at the margin of the group. As a scholar of Isaac Babel, Hetényi was deeply interested in Judaism, and even started to learn Hebrew, but she came from a culturally mixed background of converted grandfathers and Christian grandmothers: this proved to be an obstacle in her deeper involvement in religious circles. This intermediary position she considers in retrospective a great advantage for her research in the field of writers with dual identity and of two cultures. In the final account, she did not have time to practice any dissident activities for she became a mother.
Hetényi regularly read samizdat publications, like the Bibó Emlékkönyv (Book in Memory of Bibó, 1980) and Bibó himself, but first and foremost she read Russian samizdat and tamizdat. She first travelled to the West in 1982: as for many others, this gave Hetényi occasional access to publications unavailable in Hungary. Her source was once the bookshop at St Paul's in London, where one could obtain books by showing an Eastern European ID. She herself was involved in distributing illegal materials, not only in Hungary, but also in the Soviet Union. She befriended with Heinrich Pfandl, an Austrian Slavist from Graz, who regularly supported those in need with cash and smuggled Bibles, books, and audio recordings of Vladimir Vysotsky to Soviet Union where Hetényi was one of the distributors of the materials.
In 1980, the writer György Spiró asked her to translate Bulgakov's Heart of a Dog for the theater in Kaposvár. She knew Spiró via his wife at the time, Mária Klauber, they were colleagues at the secondary school Móricz Zsigmond and friends from their adolescent years, they often came together. Sometimes the writer Imre Kertész also appeared at these meetings. This was a circle of friends where the greatness of Kertész's Sorstalanság (Fatelessness, 1975) was recognized early, while it had a modest reception in the press. Later in 2002 Hetényi translated Fatelessness into Russian with her husband Shimon Markish, a recognized Russian translator. Hetényi's personal canon, therefore, greatly diverged from the official one, and this is true for the Russian authors as well. Aside of Bulgakov and Babel, she was a keen reader of Nabokov too. In 1982/83, however, after loosing her job, she became briefly hired at the journal Szovjet Irodalom (Soviet Literature). This was a time when excellent works by Boris Pasternak appeared alongside of the worst kind of Soviet propaganda art in the journal. While the move shows that the field of underground literature and the most official literary scene were not hermetically divided, Hetényi did not stand the atmosphere defined by the infamous cultural critic and editor, Pál E. Fehér and professor István Király, she terminated her contract in 1983.
In 1989, Hetényi served as expert and translator of the stage adaptation of Heart of a Dog (made by Alexandr Chervinsky) for Katona József Theater in Budapest, when director Péter Gothár finally staged the work.
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Umiestnenie:
- Budapest, Hungary
Emil Hidoș, a member of the group called Organizația Tinerilor Liberi (The Organisation of Free Youth – OTL), is the author of the musical samizdat publication Wald old popp (sic!) and of several letters to Radio Free Europe (RFE). He was born on 16 October 1950 in Bistrița, Bistrița-Năsăud county, and he worked as a waiter at a local restaurant in his native city. Hidoș came to the attention of the Romanian secret police because of the letters he wrote (alone or with his close friend, Carol Pall) and sent in October 1969 to Cornel Chiriac, the producer of the show Metronom, one of the most popular musical programmes broadcast by the RFE. It was not until June 1970 that the local Securitate managed to identify Hidoș as “Braim Iones,” the author of the letters with “hateful content” sent to the Romanian department of RFE. While he was carrying out compulsory military service away from home, the Securitate organised a search at his home and confiscated other letters addressed to Cornel Chiriac and some copies of Hidoș’s samizdat publication Wald old popp (sic!). The common element of these writings that formed the core of his cultural dissidence was his revolt against the lack of liberty for young people who craved to listen to foreign music and expressed their attachment to Western musical subcultures. Emil Hidoș protested against the lack of entertainment possibilities and the attempts of the regime to control the spare time of young people through its mass organisations. He also denounced the brutal interventions of the communist Militia against young people with long hair and Western clothing, who came to personify for the regime the “social parasitism” that Decree 153/1970 legally incriminated (ACNSAS, P 14400 vol. 1–3).
The Securitate opened a penal investigation, during which Emil Hidoș and his friend Carol Pall were severely beaten until they admitted the imaginary guilt of “propaganda against the socialist order.” In September 1970, the two defendants were put on trial and judged by The Military Tribunal in Cluj-Napoca. As a result, Emil Hidoș received the more severe punishment of six years imprisonment in comparison to his co-accused who received two years and six months. His case was popularised by an article published in Scânteia tineretului, the official newspaper of the Union of Communist Youth, the party-sponsored youth organisation. In fact, the article was a harsh indictment of those young people, like Emil Hidoș and his friends, who expressed their attachment to the hippy movement and preferred to remain on the margins of socialist society. After his early release from prison in 1973, Hidoș continued to be harassed by the Securitate, which prevented him from living a decent life. In 1987, his request for an exit visa was finally approved and he was allowed to leave for The Federal Republic of Germany to join his wife who had refused to return to Romania after a visit to her parents. In 2007, Emil Hidoș returned to Romania and in February 2018, he agreed for the first time to speak publicly about his experience with the communist Securitate (Șchiopu 2018).
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Umiestnenie:
- Bistrita, Bistrița, Romania