He is a sound engineer, and he spent more than 30 years in Bánk (the site of a unique summer festival (“nyaraltatás”) organized by the reform-minded pedagogue Eszter Leveleki, not far from Budapest. He began going to the camp as a kid in the 1930s, and then he kept coming back for decades. He had a personal relationship with Eszter Leveleki. Ferenc Háber inherited all the materials related to Bánk from her.
László Hámos was born in 1951 in Paris to Romanian and Slovakian Hungarian parents and was raised in a New Jersey suburb of New York. He graduated his schools already in the United States and was socialized in American Hungarian circles. After his graduation from the Mount Hermon School (Massachusetts), he studied international relations at the University of Pennsylvania. Although he did not earn a degree there, he soon was employed by a legal administration office. Besides pursuing advocacy activities, he worked at the law firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore for 3 and a half years, then he owned a company which performed legal research and litigation support services for law firms in midtown Manhattan
He is the cofounder of the Committee for Human Rights in Romania. He wrote and edited several volumes, document compendiums, and position papers regarding human rights developments in Eastern Europe. He testified 24 times and the organization submitted more than 1,000 pages of printed testimony at hearings before various Congressional Committees. László Hámos gave presentations at numerous Congressional Human Rights Caucus briefings and represented the concerns of Hungarian minorities at nine international Helsinki Review meetings since 1980. Mr. Hámos met all five U.S. presidents since 1976: as an official delegate of the Hungarian diaspora, he took part in negotiations with Presidents Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Bush. He also lectured at several American Universities and serves as a consultant for the news media and other international human rights monitoring organizations. Furthermore, as a frequent visitor to Central Europe, he assisted a variety of U.S. fact-finding missions and did interviews with many prominent ethnic Hungarians. He continued his efforts to protect the rights of Hungarians living outside the borders after 1989, helping to improve the democratic transition by broadening the North American network of leaders of Hungarian communities in Central and Eastern Europe.
Ágnes Háy was born in 1952 in Budapest, the daughter of painter Károly László Háy (1907-1961) and art-historian Lujza Havas (1923). Her uncle was writer Gyula Háy (1900-1975). She graduated from the Eötvös József High School in 1971. She published her first graphics in 1968, and she started to produce animations in 1969. Háy attended many exhibitions and film festivals. She joined the Hungarian Democratic Opposition in the 1970s. She met György Krassó (1932-1991), and became his partner until his death. In 1985, the couple emigrated to London. They had a child, who was born in 1987. In 1995, Háy donated the documents of György and Miklós Krassó as a deposit to the Budapest City Archives. She studied at the Academy of Indian Dances (1992-1998) and the School of African and Oriental Studies (1999-2003). She received a BA degree in African Studies and Art in 2003. She then studied Digital Moving Image Studies at the Metropolitan University in London. She lives in Great Britain, where she makes graphics and moving pictures and teaches animation.
In the GDR, the specialist in German Studies, Frank Hörnigk committed himself to critical literature and the theatre scene. He tried to make this critical culture more public, and therefore faced official sanction. As a consequence, he could not be appointed a full-time professor for Contemporary German Literature at Humboldt-University in Berlin, before 1990. Hörnigk has also been a specialist for Georg Büchner and directed the complete edition of Arnold Zweig. Furthermore, he dedicated himself to the publication of the scattered works of playwright Heiner Müller. Frank Hörnigk retired in 2008, and passed away in 2016.
Milan Hübl was born on 27 January 1927 in Nitra, Czechoslovakia (now Slovakia). He was a Czechoslovak historian, teacher and politician. He studied at the Social Academy in Brno. From 1950–1964 he lectured at the Political University of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CC CPC). In the 1960s, he was a researcher at the Institute of History of European Socialist Countries of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences in Prague. In particular he looked at the history of the workers' movement, recent Central European history and issues concerning contemporary socialism. At that time, he was an advocate of the reformist movement and in 1968 he actively participated in the liberalization process known as the Prague Spring. From 1968–1969 he was a member of the CC CPC and the rector of the Political University of the CC CPC. He was a member of the Czech National Council (1969) and a member of the Federal Assembly of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (1969–1971). However, after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, he was gradually stripped of all his party and political functions. In 1970 he was even expelled from the Communist Party and dismissed from his job at the Political University. In the 1970s and 1980s he was involved in publishing samizdat literature and in particular he contributed to independent samizdat anthologies. He devoted himself to the themes from recent Czechoslovak history, such as the expulsion of the Germans from Czechoslovakia after 1945, the democratization process and the Prague Spring of 1968 in a political, social and cultural context, and the relationship between Czechoslovakia and its neighbouring countries. At the beginning of the 1970s, he co-edited the samizdat journals “Situační zprávy” (Situational Reports) and “Fakta – připomínky – události” (Facts – Comments – Events). In 1972 Milan Hübl was convicted for alleged subversion of the republic and was imprisoned until 1976; Gustáv Husák refused to grant him an amnesty when he was appointed President of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic in May 1975, despite the fact that Hübl had supported Husák and even helped him with his rehabilitation in 1963 after a conviction in a fabricated political trial and had endorsed him during Husák’s promotion to the highest function of the Communist Party in April 1969. Eventually, Milan Hübl was released along with Jaroslav Šabata and Jiří Müller in December 1976 thanks to a campaign by human rights organizations from the West, inspired by Czechoslovak exiles. Shortly afterwards Charter 77 was formed and Milan Hübl became one of its signatories. He was editor of Lidové noviny from 1987 to 1989, a journal which was also published as a samizdat at the time. From 1987, he was registered as a State Security collaborator, although witnesses agree that he did not harm anyone. He did not live to see the fall of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia – he died on 28 October 1989 in Prague. His book Cesty k moci (Paths to Power) was published posthumously in 1990.
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Vieta:
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Nitra, Slovakia
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Praha, Prague, Czech Republic