Václav Havel was a Czech statesman, author, poet, playwright and former dissident. Havel served as the last president of Czechoslovakia from 1989 until 1992, prior to the dissolution of Czechoslovakia on 31 December, before he became the first president of the Czech Republic from 1993 to 2003. He was the first democratically elected president of either country after the fall of communism. As a writer of Czech literature, he is known for his plays, essays and memoirs.
Charter 77 was an informal civic initiative in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic from 1976 to 1992, named after the document Charter 77 from January 1977. Founding members and architects were Jiří Němec, Václav Benda, Ladislav Hejdánek, Václav Havel, Jan Patočka, Zdeněk Mlynář, Jiří Hájek, Martin Palouš, Pavel Kohout, and Ladislav Lis. Spreading the text of the document was considered a political crime by the Czechoslovak government. After the 1989 Velvet Revolution, many of the members of the initiative played important roles in Czech and Slovak politics.
Ludvík Vaculík was a Czech writer and journalist. He was born in Brumov, Moravian Wallachia. A prominent samizdat writer, he was best known as the author of the "Two Thousand Words" manifesto of June 1968.
Václav Benda was a Czech Roman Catholic activist and intellectual, and mathematician. Under Communist rule in Czechoslovakia, Benda and his wife were rare in being believings Christians among the leadership of the anti-communist dissident organization Charter 77. After the Velvet Revolution, Benda became the head of an organization charged with investigating the former Czechoslovakian secret police and their many informants.
Jiří Gruša was a Czech poet, novelist, translator, diplomat and politician.
Alexandr Vondra is a Czech politician and diplomat who served as Minister of Defence of the Czech Republic from 2010 to 2012 under Prime Minister Petr Nečas and has been Member of the European Parliament (MEP) since 2019.
Olga Havlová was a Czech dissident, activist, and the first wife of Václav Havel, the last President of Czechoslovakia and first President of the Czech Republic. Havlová, the inaugural First Lady of the Czech Republic and final First Lady of Czechoslovakia, was the founder of the Committee of Good Will and a signatory of Charter 77.
The Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Prosecuted was a Czechoslovak dissident organization founded largely by Charter 77 signatories. VONS was founded on 27 April 1978.
Moshe Bejski was a Polish-born Israeli Supreme Court Justice and President of Yad Vashem's Righteous Among the Nations Commission. After surviving the Holocaust with the help of Oskar Schindler, Bejski immigrated to Israel. In 1961, he testified about his experiences during the Holocaust during the trial of Adolf Eichmann. He served on the Tel Aviv-Yafo district court from 1968 to 1979 and was appointed to the Supreme Court of Israel, where he served from 1979 to 1991. As President of the Righteous Commission from 1975 to 1991, Bejski helped honor thousands of Holocaust rescuers. He also headed the Bejski Commission in the aftermath of the 1983 Israel bank stock crisis, which led to the nationalization of most of Israel's major banks.
Gabriele Nissim is an Italian journalist, historian and essayist whose works discuss Eastern Europe.
The Black Ribbon Day, officially known in the European Union as the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism and also referred to as the Europe-wide Day of Remembrance for the victims of all totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, is an international day of remembrance for victims of totalitarianism regimes, specifically Stalinist, communist, Nazi and fascist regimes. Formally recognised by the European Union, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and some other countries, it is observed on 23 August. It symbolises the rejection of "extremism, intolerance and oppression" according to the European Union. The purpose of the Day of Remembrance is to preserve the memory of the victims of mass deportations and exterminations, while promoting democratic values to reinforce peace and stability in Europe. It is one of the two official remembrance days or observances of the European Union, alongside Europe Day. Under the name Black Ribbon Day it is an official remembrance day of Canada. The European Union has used both names alongside each other.
The Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism was a declaration which was initiated by the Czech government and signed on 3 June 2008 by prominent European politicians, former political prisoners and historians, among them former Czech President Václav Havel and future German President Joachim Gauck, calling for "Europe-wide condemnation of, and education about, the crimes of communism." Much of the content of the declaration reproduced demands formulated by the European People's Party in 2004, and draws heavily on the theory or conception of totalitarianism.
Monte Stella ("Starmount"), also informally called Montagnetta di San Siro is an artificial hill and surrounding city park in Milan, Italy. The park, established in the 1950s, has an overall area of 370,000 m². The hill was created using the debris from the buildings that were bombed during World War II, as well as from the last remnants of the Spanish walls of the city, demolished in the mid 20th century.
The Platform of European Memory and Conscience is an educational project of the European Union bringing together government institutions and NGOs from EU countries active in research, documentation, awareness raising and education about the crimes of totalitarian regimes. Its membership includes 68 government agencies and NGOs from 15 EU member states and 8 non-EU countries including Ukraine, Albania, Georgia, Iceland, Moldova, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada. Its members include the Institute of National Remembrance, the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial, the Stasi Records Agency and the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. The platform has offices in Prague and Brussels (formerly). The President of the platform is Łukasz Kamiński, former President of the Polish Institute of National Remembrance.
The Seventy Years Declaration was a declaration initiated by academics Dovid Katz and Danny Ben-Moshe and released on 20 January 2012 to protest against the policies of several European states and European Union bodies on the evaluation, remembrance and prosecution of crimes committed under communist dictatorships in Europe, specifically policies of many European countries and the EU treating the Nazi and Stalinist regimes in Eastern and Central Europe as equally criminal. Presented as a response to the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism initiated by the Czech government in 2008 to condemn communism as totalitarian and criminal, it explicitly rejects the idea that the regimes of Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler are morally equivalent, i.e. the totalitarianism theory that was popularized by academics such as Hannah Arendt, Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski and became dominant in Western political discourse during the Cold War, and that has gained new momentum in many new EU member states following the fall of communism, resulting in international resolutions, establishment of research institutes and museums, and a day of remembrance. The declaration also states that communist regimes did not commit genocides, citing the 1948 Genocide Convention which restricts genocide to mass killings related to ethnicity, race, nationality, or religion. The declaration advances the position that the Holocaust was unique, a subject of some debate. The declaration was signed by 70, mostly left-wing, parliamentarians from Europe. It was released on the 70th anniversary of the Wannsee Conference in Berlin.
Rudolf Battěk was a Czech sociologist, politician, and political dissident during Czechoslovakia Communist era.
The Garden of the Righteous in Warsaw is a memorial site in Wola, Muranów. The initiators of the idea are the History Meeting House and the Italian foundation GARIWO. It is a place to honour those who, during the 20th and 21st centuries, in the face of totalitarianism and genocide, had the courage to defend human dignity. Each year, on the European Day of the Righteous, the Garden Committee, announces the names of those to be honoured with that title. The garden was designed by Barbara Kraus-Galińska's landscape architecture studio.
Ján Mlynárik was a Czech and Slovak historian and dissident, Charter 77 signatory, and member of the Federal Assembly from 1990 to 1992 as a representative of Public Against Violence.
Milan Balabán was a Czechoslovak theologian, professor of religion and the Old Testament, Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren (ECCB) pastor, and poet. Balabán, an anti-communist dissident during Czechoslovakia's communist era, was a Charter 77 signatory. He was also among of group of Czech Old Testament scholars who wrote and translated the Old Testament theologians the Czech Ecumenical Translation of the Bible, which remains the most widely used Czech language translation of the Bible today.
The Anticharter was the 1977 reaction of the Communist Czechoslovak ruling power under Gustáv Husák, combined with a signature campaign by prominent cultural figures, condemning Charter 77, a civic initiative drawn up by Václav Havel and Pavel Kohout, among others, in 1976.
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