COURAGE

povezivanje zbirki

The National Museum-Memorial to the Victims of Occupation “Prison on Lonskogo Street” has a small, but growing, archival collection. A detention facility used by the Polish police, the Nazi and Soviet occupational regimes, and lastly the KGB, this museum-memorial has a storied past. The building was used by regional state security services (SBU) as a prison until 1996. After the local community caught wind of a plan to allow developers to build on the site in 2006, activists mobilized to transform the prison into a site commemorating the thousands of prisoners executed by the NKVD in 1941 as the Red Army fled from advancing Nazi forces, and those incarcerated here in the decades that followed.

Curators have amassed 2,000 items since the museum’s opening in 2009. In addition to World War II propaganda from Nazi and Soviet forces, it holds the personal belongings of political prisoners and detainees—letters, personal documents, and samizdat publications used to prosecute dissidents, artists, and human rights activists in Lviv and its surrounding environs in the 1960s and 1970s. The latter is an ad hoc collection of about 50 items described in the rest of this entry, which includes embroidery, rosaries made out of bread, and other materials created by prisoners serving out lengthy sentences in Siberian labour camps under Brezhnev. Situated within the larger context of the museum-memorial’s holdings, these materials about Lviv’s dissidents is important for understanding the Soviet Union’s treatment of its most intransigent opponents well into the Brezhnev era.

In 1963 the painter and graphic artist Roger Loewig was arrested following his first privately organised exhibition in East-Berlin. Throughout the regime, Loewig denied socialist realism artistic forms of production, while his artworks were considered subversive. After almost one year of imprisonment, Loewig was released in the GDR with the support from the Protestant Church from West Germany. Loewig’s release on three years probation could not be prevented. It was only 1972 that the artist could leave the GDR and settled in West-Berlin. Following his death in 1997, Loewig’s private fine-arts collection was bestowed by the Roger Loewig Association. This was founded in 1998 in Frankfurt Oder. Since 2000 the fine-arts legacy of the artist is preserved by the Federal Foundation for Reappraisal of the SED Dictatorship. This aims at facilitating the scientific documentation and preservation of Loewig' artistic legacy. The literary and biographical works are currently on hold at the Academy of Arts in Berlin.

This private family collection presents a personal perspective on communist rule. It includes materials which describe the point of view of the family whose member was deemed "an enemy of the people" by the socialist state. The life paths of the creators of the collection highlight the different stages and transformations of the communist regime: the fate of the family of Dimitar and Marika Stoyanov is an example of the repression of members and supporters of opposition parties, characteristic of the 1940s and 1950s.
Dimitar Vasilev Stoyanov was an anarchist, convicted three times by two regimes because of his political convictions. He spent more than 6 years in forced labor-educational camps under communism (in 1945 and 1948-1953).
This collection was created by Dimitar’s wife, Marika, and his son, Vantzeti Vassilev. The materials show the restrictions faced by the immediate family and relatives of people classified as politically "unreliable" or as "enemies of the people". Due to his "untrustworthy" origins, Vantzeti Vassilev was pressured by State Security to become an informant. As a form of personal resistance, Vantzeti Vassilev started writing the autobiographical book Semenata na straha [The Seeds of Fear] in the early 1980s. Seeing little future in Bulgaria, he left for Serbia to reach Italy, continuing on to the US in 1988, carrying with him a copy of the yet-unpublished book, part of the collection. The collection shows resistance in the form of a conscious "escape into oneself" through