COURAGE

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František Janouch (b. 1931) is a Czech and Swedish nuclear physicist, publicist, dissident, founder of the Charter 77 Foundation and still a chairman of its board of directors. He studied physics in St. Petersburg and Moscow. After returning to Czechoslovakia, he was Head of the Department of Theoretical Nuclear Physics at the Czechoslovak Institute of Nuclear Research and Associate Professor at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of Charles University. In 1970, he was expelled from his posts as a result of political purge and was banned from lecturing at universities. After numerous international protests, he was allowed to emigrate in 1974 and his Czechoslovak citizenship was revoked a year later. He moved his scientific research to Sweden but he also gave a number of guest performances in other Western countries and gained degrees of Dr. a Prof. h. c. at several world universities.

In 1978 Janouch co-founded the Charter 77 Foundation in Stockholm, which he continues to be the head of to this day. He chose the award ceremony of the Monismanien Prize for Freedom of Speech, which was awarded to the Charter 77 movement, to announce the foundation and called upon the public to support persecuted signers of Charter 77. Through the Foundation, Janouch significantly contributed to the founding of the Original Videojournal when he smuggled the first video camera to Czechoslovakia in 1985 and later, more technical equipment for video production and material help. The idea of a “video project” emerged from the correspondence between Janouch, historian Vilém Prečan and Václav Havel at the turn of 1983/1984, but only televisions and video recorders were considered. A year later Havel suggested the possibilities of a video camera which was later handed over to amateur filmmakers from the documentary group Čeněk [Chen-yek]. Before that, the filmmakers had used only analog film and the footage had to go through a risky path in order to be developed abroad. Janouch, as a representative of the Charter 77 Foundation, supported the activities of the Original Videojournal throughout the filming and archived the parts of the samizdat video magazine that were sent.

Vladimír Janoušek was a Czech sculptor and painter. He graduated from the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague in 1950. He met his future wife, Věra Janouškova (neé Havlová), also a sculptor, while he was studying there. He belonged to the generation of sculptors who tried to set themselves against socialist realism through their work, drawing inspiration from the interwar avant-garde. In 1960 he became the founding member of the UB 12 art group. When creating his sculptures, Janoušek would weld together metal materials. Figures featured predominantly – his characters were often surrounded by constructions made from wire. During the mid-1960s, his sculptures began to take on more of a technical character and resembled machine mechanisms. Janoušek became an “undesirable” sculptor during Normalization – he was forbidden from exhibiting in public and his designs were rejected from public competitions. During this period, his work was principally inspired by movement. In addition to sculpture, Janoušek also devoted himself to painting and drawing.

Věra Janoušková was a Czech sculptor, graphic designer and painter. In 1948 she married the sculptor Vladimír Janoušek, who was her fellow student at the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague. In 1960 she helped establish the UB 12 art group, and in the 1960s, alongside her husband, she was one of the most distinctive figures in the Czech art scene. However, as with her husband, she was one of the most persecuted artists during Normalization. She lost all public commissions, was forced to cut off her international contacts and until 1989 she was only able to rarely exhibit her works in unofficial places outside of Prague. After 1989, however, her work began to be exhibited once more, both at home and abroad. Her personal technique was the “stitching” of statues (mainly figures) with welding wire. She also created monochrome, mainly purely white statues from asbestos. From the 1970s an important part of her work also became paper collages.

Augustinas Janulaitis was a famous Lithuanian political and cultural activist. He cooperated with the illegal Lithuanian media, and was an active member of the Social Democratic Party. He translated the Communist Manifesto (the first edition, 1904) into Lithuanian. Janulaitis was persecuted by the Imperial Russian government for his political activity, and was obliged to emigrate. For a few years, he studied at Bern University in Switzerland. He returned to the Russian Empire, and graduated in law from Moscow University. During the interwar period, as a well-known lawyer and professor, he shifted to the political right, and published a critical study about Soviet Russia ('Lithuania and Contemporary Russia', 1925.) Janulaitis was known to students, the academic community and the public as a legal and cultural historian. He collected material about personalities who played an important role in Lithuanian history and culture: about the lawyer and historian Ignas Danilevičius (1787-1843), the writer and folklorist Mykalojus Akelaitis (1829-1887), the poet Kiprijonas Nezabitauskis (1779-1837), the cultural historian Simonas Daukantas (1793-1864), and others. Janulaitis wrote and published biographies of Danilevičius and Akelaitis. His studies in Lithuanian culture had a huge influence on students, including Meilė Matjošaitytė-Lukšienė (1913-2009), who became a well-known cultural historian, and at the end of the 1980s she helped to initiate the Sąjūdis movement along with other Lithuanian intellectuals. Janulaitis was the uncle of Meilė Lukšienė. 

During the Soviet period, Janulaitis was loyal to the regime. He participated in creating the Academy of Sciences in Soviet Lithuania in 1941, and was elected a member. In 1945, he became the dean of the Faculty of History at Vilnius University. However, in 1946, he was accused of 'bourgeois nationalism' during an ideological campaign that was started by Party authorities against 'Western influences' and 'cosmopolitism'. The Party leadership 'reminded' him of his negative attitude towards Soviet Russia. He survived, but retired from the university and the academy. He died in 1950. Students and the younger generation of the Lithuanian intelligentsia saw him as a representative of the cultural elite of independent Lithuania. His studies in 19th-century Lithuanian culture and his collection of documents about activists in the national revival had a huge impact on Lithuanian historians, especially during the period of the national revival in 1988-1990.

Croatian and American historian Jere (Jerome) Jareb was born in Prvić Šepurina (Croatia) on May 3, 1922, and died in Charlottesville (Virginia, USA) on November 22, 2017. After completing the classics gymnasium in Šibenik, he left the town because Fascist Italy occupied it in September 1941. He moved to Zagreb where he studied at the Faculty of Law. Due to his poor health, he was not recruited into the army of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH). He became a member of the editorial board of the magazine Ustaška mladež (Ustasha Youth), where he wrote historical articles until the end of World War II. In the fall of 1944, he was severely stricken by a bout of tuberculosis in the bone of his right leg, and in July 1947 his leg was amputated. At the beginning of May 1945, instead of the planned hospitalisation, he ended up at the refugee camp in the suburbs of Klagenfurt. He stayed in the camp for three months, after which he was sent to the hospital where he remained until May 1949. In December 1951, he moved to Salzburg to seek an immigration visa to the United States.

In January 1952, he flew to New York, where his father, a pre-war economic emigrant, lived. Jere lived in New York until 1966. He was one of the founders of the Croatian Academy in America, established in 1953, and served as its executive secretary for the first four years, and then later became its president. Along with Karlo Mirth, he was the editor of the Academy's Journal of Croatian Studies, which was founded in 1960. From 1953 to 1995, he was a trustee of the journal Hrvatska revija (Croatian Review). From 1953, he studied history at Columbia University, where he earned his MA in 1958. He concluded his graduate studies, with an emphasis on East-Central European and Western Europe contemporary history, in 1964 by defending a doctoral dissertation entitled "The Adriatic Question from June 1919 to February 1924." During his stay in New York, he constantly acquired books from the homeland that he needed to study Croatian history. Olga Živković, then employed at the Lexicographic Institute, sent him books regularly. When Olga travelled to the United States in 1959, Jere Jareb married her (Matković 2008: 722). From 1963 to 1966, he lectured at Rutgers University (New Jersey), and in 1966 he moved to St. Francis University in Loretto (Pennsylvania), where he lectured on European and world history until his retirement in 1992. From 1968 until his retirement, he was chairman of the University’s History Department.

His best known book, Pola stoljeća hrvatske politike (One-Half Century of Croatian Politics), was initially a critical review of Vladko Maček's memoirs, which were serialized in Hrvatska revija (1959). In 1960, he expanded the text and published it as a book in Buenos Aires in 1960. It was a political history of Croatia from 1895 to 1945, with an emphasis on the history of the Ustasha Movement and the NDH. In that book, he presented a different view of the history of 20^th-century Croatian politics than the one that  had prevailed in Croatia and other parts of Yugoslavia. After publishing this book, he became close to the Croatian political emigration. He contacted and interviewed numerous Croatian emigrants, from Vladko Maček, through Juraj Krnjević, Lovro Sušić, to Eugen ‘Dido’ Kvaternik. He also had contacts with historians and other intellectuals from the homeland such as Ljubo Boban, Bogdan Krizman, and Zvonimir Kulundžić. Historians in the country saw his books as valuable and professional works, although they were banned in Yugoslavia. He is also the author of the books Političke uspomene i rad dra Branimira Jelića (Political Memories and Work of Dr Branimir Jelić) published in Cleveland in 1982; Zlato i novac Nezavisne Države Hrvatske izneseni u inozemstvo 1944. i 1945.: dokumentarni prikaz (Gold and money of the Independent State of Croatia taken abroad in 1944 and 1945: Documents) (Zagreb, 1997), and Državno gospodarstveno povjerenstvo Nezavisne Države Hrvatske od kolovoza 1941. do travnja 1945.: dokumentarni prikaz (State Economic Commission of the Independent State of Croatia from August 1941 to April 1945: Documents) (Zagreb, 2001). At the late stage of his career, he was also a corresponding associate of the Croatian Institute of History.

During his academic career, he gathered his collection of books and other publications, which he donated to the Croatian Institute of History in 1997. He has been active in preserving the cultural and historical heritage of Croatian emigrants, so had donated the émigré periodicals to the National and University Library in Zagreb, and the documentation (grey literature) of Croatian emigrants to the Croatian State Archives in Zagreb.

Although he was an anti-communist, he did not join any political organisations nor did he engage in political activism. Jareb acted only on a cultural and academic basis, trying to preserve the legacy of Croatian emigrant communities and explore those spheres and themes in Croatian history such as the history of the NDH which could not be studied freely the communist regime, for only an ideological approach was allowed.