Tymoteusz Onyszkiewicz (1973) was one of the first anarchist activists in the capital of Polish People’s Republic. When he was 13 years old he had become a fan of the metal music, but after about a year he switched to punk rock. Polish and Western punk tapes brought to him for the first time the ideas of anarchism. He mocked communist organisations such as The Polish-Soviet Friendship Society, whose board bulletin he used to change, parodying official announcements. As a student of a Szkolny Ośrodek Socjoterapii (SOS, School Sociotherapy Centre) he met other youngsters fascinated by anarchism, among them Arkadiusz ‘Owca’ Zajączkowski. They started organising anarchist meetings and demonstrations and founded the A-Cyclists collective. Onyszkiewicz took part in demonstrations, happenings, and rallies organized by anarchists and other youth opposition groups, as well as street fights with the skinheads and police. He continued his anarchistic engagement after 1989 transition and participated in preparing the alter-globalist protests against European Economic Summit in Warsaw in 2004. Poet, writer, author of poems, novels, essays, articles published in journals as well as in popular papers. Philosopher interested in the gnosis, Buddhism, and ancient philosophy. He works as a trainer of yoga and martial arts.

As a participant of the anarchist movement under the late socialism and still an active member of Anarchist Federation Tymoteusz Onyszkiewicz was one of the initiators of the Fuck 89 exhibition in 2014 and author of the Fuck 89 manifesto. Although the cooperation of informal ‘steering committee’ was collective and anonymous, Onyszkiewicz played the main role in the production of the exhibition. After the original exposition in A.D.A. squat in Warsaw, he presented the Fuck 89 archive in anarchists' sites in Wrocław, Rzeszów, and Kraków. Onyszkiewicz drew the very conception of the Fuck 89 as a symbolic farewell of heroic past from the 1980s, with its legends and heroes, necessary to raise a new anarchistic movement, free from the old mistakes. Anarchists failed in 1989, he argued, the end of socialism turned out to be a beginning of a new, oppressing regime: neoliberal capitalism. So there should be no sentiments toward ineffective struggles when some new are on the horizon. Thus the Fuck 89 was an anti-sentimental gesture closure in the history of post-war anarchism in Poland.

Onyszkiewicz and other young anarchists were radically against the socialist government and militarized state regime. However, at the same time, they opposed ‘Solidarity’ movement as clerical, nationalist, and conservative. Onyszkiewicz remembered that also cultural divisions between the mainstream and the alternative were not strict because as a young punk rock fan he was able to buy cassettes in official, public stores.

Source:
Tymoteusz Onyszkiewicz, Fuck 89 Manifesto, 2014.

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Lokacija:
- Warszawa, Warsaw, Poland

Opekar, Aleš

Aleš Opekar is a Czech musicologist, journalist and director of the Popmuseum in Prague. During his graduate and postgraduate studies, he focused on, among other things, the lyrics of Czech pop music. As a musicologist and music journalist, he published in Gramorevue, Melodie and Mladá fronta in the 1980s. He worked as a journalist in magazine Rock&Pop in the 1990s. He gives lectures on pop music at universities and he worked in Institute for Musicology on the Czech Academy of Sciences until 1998. He is active in Czech Radio, where he was the head of the Department of Jazz and Pop Music between 1999 and 2012; he has been a music editor since 2013. He collaborated on the filming of the documentary TV series Bigbít (1998, Czech Television). He initiated the founding of the museum and archive of pop music (the Popmuseum), where the archive materials were originally stored after they were collected for the filming of the TV series.

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Lokacija:
- Praha, Prague, Czech Republic

Orban, Traian

Traian Orban (b. Petroșani, 20 februarie 1944) is a vet by profession. However following his participation in the Revolution of 1989, this became an insignificant detail for his identity. As he presents himself, in a veritable declaration of faith in the mission taken up by the institution that he has run for more than two and a half decades: “At present I am a pensioner, a category II invalid and disabled since I was shot during the Revolution. I am the president of the Memorial to the Revolution Association, founded in 1990, an association that was set up out of the desire to honour the memory of the heroes, to create a centre of documentation, to find out the truth about the Revolution, to create a memorial complex of monuments marking the most important locations in the city, where people were killed.”

The Revolution of 1989 brought a change of regime for the whole of Romania, but Traian Orban’s direct participation in the revolt in Timişoara was an event that marked him profoundly with the drama of the events and radically changed his way of looking at life. Traian Orban was shot on 17 December, one of the bloodiest days of the events that took place in Timişoara at the start of the Romanian Revolution of 1989. As recalled by Traian Orban, the moment that changed his destiny unfolded thus: “I arrived in Liberty Square in front of the Macul Roşu [“red poppy”] confectionery. Some individuals had devastated the confectionery, taken the furniture out onto the tram lines and set it on fire. The second-hand shop in the square had also been devastated; people were coming out with clothes, with cameras, with TVs and other valuable objects. They were offered to the demonstrators. We refused to take them. We protested, but in vain – they got on with the job and disappeared with the objects. In Liberty Square the tanks arrived. One of the tanks was set on fire and headed quickly towards Unification Square along Str. Alecsandri, to the cheers of the crowd. The cordons of soldiers were trying to block access to the square. There was still no shooting. I took part in blocking a tank in Liberty Square; some young people positioned themselves in front of it, and tried to stick various objects into its tracks. I got my hand on a tank towing cable, and stuck it into the tracks, and I asked a young man to put a rag in the exhaust pipe, with the result that the engine stopped. Immediately to the cheers of the crowd, the tank stopped. Near the garrison in Liberty Square there were some cars. One of them was set on fire. I found out later that they were the cars of some military staff in Division 8, which had its headquarters in the square. After the burning of the car, the signal was given to start the repression; it was after 4.30 pm when they started shooting. They were probably using training bullets, because nobody was wounded. There were cheers; a lot of people were trying to withdraw from the square. We tried to head for the Opera along Str. Alba Iulia, but a column of demonstrators was coming from the Opera shouting ‘Freedom.’ The crowd in the square thinned out. I saw a few people being detained. I didn’t want to go away from in front of the garrison; I was shouting: “The army is with us!... Down with Ceauşescu!” I want to tell you that between 4 and 4.30 I talked with some conscripts. They told me they had been on alert since 5 am. They had weapons, but they didn’t have bullets. I offered them cigarettes. I noticed that after 4.30 the firing got more intense. I saw that pieces of plaster were falling from the walls, a sign that indeed they were firing real bullets. I was scared and withdrew into various buildings on the square. Then I went back into the square, trying to head towards the museum on the then Str. Karl Marx, but another column of demonstrators came from there too and I saw an officer being attacked by the demonstrators. They were beating him. We went back, back in front of the garrison, where before 5 pm three civilians with pistols emerged from the military garrison together with three men in military greatcoats and caps and with automatics in their hands. I saw that from the Division headquarters, where the statue of Decebalus is, they were firing from the balcony and from a window; I saw some conscripts trying to put out a fire, a Dacia car. At a certain point, when I was at the crossing of Liberty Square with Karl Marx, I talked a little with the soldiers and I heard that a soldier had been shot. Beside me someone was wounded, and I bent down over him to see what had happened to him. He was bleeding heavily and the blood splashed on my face and my clothes. At the same moment I was shot in the leg, before 5 pm. I cried out; I fainted with pain; I could feel I was being carried by some young people to a car, and I was taken by car to the County Hospital. The pain was very severe when they held me by the wounded leg. They thought I had been hit somewhere in the face, in the head, because I was covered with blood. In the hospital, I was undressed; I was put on a stretcher; they gave me first aid; but I was left in the corridor. Probably there were much greater emergencies. In the corridors, on stretchers, in wheelchairs, there were wounded people; some were shouting; there were dead there; it was beyond description. Stretchers were coming with wounded from ambulances, which kept bringing more and more wounded. I waited a long time; I was in the corridor; it was cold; it was winter. At a certain point, a stretcher-bearer came up to me and said he worked in the village of Şipet, in Dorna. He asked me how it had happened; I told him. He got to know me. I asked him to bring me a blanket and he suggested to some stretcher-bearers that it would be a good idea for me to be taken to the Orthopaedic Hospital. And so I got out of the County Hospital, where I heard that horrible things happened. I was transported to the Orthopaedic Hospital after about an hour; it was after 6 pm. I was taken into a ward; a preliminary toilet was carried out, but it was all an incredible shambles. The hospital was overcrowded. The next day I was moved to another ward. After about nine days, I heard that a team of doctors from Austria had arrived in the hospital; they treated me in an initial phase, and then I was transported as part of a convoy of ambulances to Vienna. On 27 December I was the first patient the Austrians operated on. They were a team of Austrian doctors from various hospitals; from the Polytrauma Hospital there was Professor Johan Poigenfurt, who was the head of the clinic. During the period when these doctors were treating the wounded, they were still shooting in Timişoara. These doctors were extraordinary. They saved a lot of people from perishing.” (Orban 1997)

Traian Orban is at present one of the leading figures in civil society in the west of Romania, a respected personality in the Romanian public space and one of the most insistent fighters for finding out the truth about the Romanian Revolution of 1989. As he confessed to the COURAGE project researchers, Traian Orban has a vision of communism, at least the communism that he experienced in Romania, that is utterly unequivocal: “It was a political system without a God; it was a system against human nature. It cultivated fear, opportunism, toadyism, laziness, snitching – just about everything that is low and base in people. It didn’t bring wellbeing to people; it reduced most of them to the verge of bare subsistence. Communism generated a lot of suffering through dictatorship, through the repressive system that it embodied, through the personality cult, through restrictions on human rights. With all sorts of limits imposed, with food rationing, with insufficient clothing. Nothing was for people; on the contrary it was against people, against people’s normality. With the hunger, with the cold, with the fear that it brought, communism was against people.”

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Lokacija:
- Timișoara, Romania

Ordass, Lajos

Lajos Ordass (originally Wolf) was a Hungarian Lutheran bishop. He was born in 1901, in Torzsa. He studied theology in Budapest, Sopron, and Wittenberg. He became a clergyman in 1924. Between 1931 and 1941, he was a pastor in Cegléd, and from 1941 to 1945, he was a priest in Kelenföld (Budapest). On 19 March 1944, he changed his name from Wolf to Ordass as a protest against the occupation of Hungary by Germany. In September 1945, the Lutheran church district of Bánya elected him to serve as their pastor. Three years later, the Economic Police of the State Protection Authority made a perquisition in his home. He was arrested and interrogated, but later he was released. On 8 September 1948, he was arrested again, and on 1 October he was condemned to two years prison for allegedly having “speculated with foreign currency”. The political leadership thought that Ordass was the main obstacle to a forthcoming “agreement” between the state and the Lutheran Church. The bishop did not want to resign from his office because he had been elected by the people of the Church, and he thought that he had never abused their confidence and would not do so even if under threat. However, he lost his office because of the ecclesiastical special disciplinary court, which had been threatened by the secret police, so it removed him from his office in an unlawful procedure just two months before his release (May 1950). He lived a life of withdrawal from public affairs until 1956, when his rehabilitation was finished in early October thanks to the meetings of the Central Committee of World Council of Churches and the State Office for Ecclesiastical Affairs, which had taken place in August 1956 at Galyatető. He returned to his office to lead the Southern Lutheran Church District (which had been created in the meantime) on 3 November 1956. He was a bishop until June 1958, when the Church forced him to retire. He never returned to the leadership of the Lutheran Church.

Ordass was a model bishop, rather than an epoch-making Church leader. He could not be the epoch-making Church figure he might have been because the communist dictatorship only allowed him to be active as a bishop for short, fragmented periods (1945–1948 and 1956–1958). In the last 28 years of his life, Ordass was either in prison (1948–50) or in the background (1950–1956 and 1958–1978), living as a retiree, isolated from active ecclesiastical service. In this period of some 30 years, Ordass created an interesting situation of conflict: the leaders of the Church and the party state were equally worried about the fact that he was a member of the Presidency of the Lutheran World Federation for 12 years. He couldn’t take part in the sessions, with the exception of two great assemblies, when he was elected to the Presidency of the Lutheran world organization.

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Lokacija:
- Budapest, Hungary

Orosz, István

Istvan Orosz works both as a film director and a graphic artist. He was born in Kecskemét, Hungary in 1951. He was trained as a graphic designer at the University of Arts and Design in Budapest. After graduation in 1975, he began to deal with theatre as a stage designer and animated films as an animator and film director. Later, when poster came to the center of his interest he made mainly theatre, movie and exhibition posters. He is known as a printmaker and an illustrator, as well. He is a regular participant at the major international biennials of posters and graphic designs and his works has been shown in individual and group exhibitions in Hungary and abroad. He is a film director at the Pannonia Film Studio in Budapest, professor of the University of West Hungary in Sopron, member of the Alliance Graphique International and the Hungarian Art Academy.

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Lokacija:
- Budapest, Hungary