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Jiří Načeradský was a Czech painter and graphic designer, and an important representative of the “new figuration”. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (1957–1963). In his work he focused mainly on figures (particularly the female) and absurd stylization. In the latter half of the 1960s his work was inspired by pop art, comics, as well as sports-photography reportage. He travelled to Paris in 1968, where he spent two years studying at the Pompidou Centre. He met his future wife in Paris with whom he returned to Czechoslovakia, despite originally intending to emigrate to the United States. He was a banned artist during Normalization and made a living renovating the facades of historical buildings. His work could, therefore, only be exhibited after the fall of the communist regime – an exhibition of his work took place in May 1990 at the Old Town Hall in Prague. At the start of the 1990s, he worked at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and later at the Faculty of Art VUT in Brno.

Sándor Nemes was born in Szekszárd-Zomba, a small village in the south of Hungary, where his father was a schoolmaster. In 1956, as a second-year high school student, he was the one who removed and threw the hated “Rákosi crest” of the school out to the street, and after the second Soviet military invasion, together with some friends, he produced flyers calling for resistance by a general strike. At the age of 15, during the Christmas holiday, he fled all alone to Yugoslavia, where he spent several months in the famed refugee camp of Gerovo, before he was taken by a French transport to the West.

After a few years working in the Citroen car factory and other places, he joined the Legion in 1960 at Fort Vincenne. He was taken to Algeria and soon was trained as a signalman with the best qualifications. When Algerian war ended in 1962 he was ordered to Corsica, then to Orange, and Tahiti. With a 16-year long service in the Legion, he transferred to the regular French Army, and was reassigned for another two years to a Paris military base. In 1975 he acquired French citizenship, and one year later he visited his native land for the first time since 1956, still as an active soldier in the French Army. He was discharged in 1978 as an ensign with 18 years of service. Then he got married, settled back in Corsica with his wife of Corsican roots, and built their family home mostly on his own in Borgo, where their two children were soon born.  He restarted his civilian career as a security expert at the Bastia Airport, and the local network of the French National Bank. After becoming a widower, he had to care for their two teenage children for years by himself. From the 1980s he could regularly visit his family left behind in Hungary. He still keeps in close contact with the members of Hungarian veterans’ circle in Provence and elsewhere in France. He is an original character with much vitality and sense of humor, which makes him popular among the much younger Hungarian legionnaires still doing their active service.  

Sándor Nemes was from the start one of the most valuable sources and supporters of the Hungarian legionary historical research project, 2011–2016. The documentary film and book Patria nostra, the twin products of this research, could not have been completed without his devoted contributions. He was the main character with his rich memories and guidance, and was also the main organizer, host, and local guide of the shootings in many sites in Corsica (Bastia, Borgo, Corte, Calvi, etc.). Furthermore, he is an excellent author of a memoir, as proven by his finely written autobiographical manuscript, a valuable item of the archival collection, illustrated with many original sources and documents. His other manuscript, “The Slang Vocabulary of the Legionnaires,” which includes close to 3,000 idioms and proverbs, is a cultural and historical rarity, and another valuable piece of the collection.

Karel Nepraš was a Czech sculptor, painter and graphic designer. He studied at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts (1952–1957). In the 1950s he co-founded a club which would later be known as the “Šmidrové” – a non-conformist, Dadaist-surrealist group which responded to the social reality and absurdity of the regime with jokes and shock prank events. The club was not only based around art, but also theatre, literature and music. After graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts, Nepraš first off all turned to drawing – often humorous and tragi-comic. Towards the end of the 1950s, he returned to sculpture – first of all figurative and then based on informalism from the start of the 1960s. In 1963 he co-founded the famous “Křížovnik School of Pure Humour without Jokes”, which brought together artists, theoreticians and representatives from the cultural underground. A year later he married the graphic designer and poet, Naďa Plíšková. Midway through the 1960s, he began making his famous statues from pipes, wire, tubes and other objects which he then added textiles to and painted the surfaces (the Red Heads, Dialogues, Moroa). Over the subsequent decades he then developed the technique of assemblage using different technical materials and objects. He was unable to exhibit his works during Normalization and worked as a restorer. In the words of Maria Klimešová, he was “one of the most banned artists of the Normalization period”. However, he continued to be part of the Křížovnik School, which from the start of the 1970s was linked to the underground, by amongst others, Ivan Martin Jirous. From 1991, Nepraš taught at the Academy of Arts in Prague and he remained in teaching until 2002. At the same time, he continued to create compositions and reliefs. His work has been exhibited in both the Czech Republic and abroad.

Fr. Wieslaw Aleksander Niewęgłowski (b. 1941): a catholic priest, Doctor of Theological Science, Theologian of Culture. One of the most recognizable figures in the Polish context of relationship between the Church and the world of culture. Born in Zbuczyn near Siedlce. After completing high-school in Siedlce in the 1960s, he studied the theory of film and media at the Faculty of Polish Studies at the Catholic University of Lublin. In 1970 he was ordained to the presbyterate in Warsaw. Since 1974 he worked in the academic church of St. Anne in Warsaw. There, in 1975, with Fr. Tadeusz Uszyński he organized the first Week of Christian Culture (WCC). In 1976 he founded the Artists’ Priesthood in Warsaw, which was an extension of the activity of WCC. Since then, and especially after the introduction of martial law in 1981, he engaged in the rapprochement between the people of culture and the Church. In 1984 he was appointed a National Chaplain of the Artists’ Community. He held this position until 2012. At the same time Fr. Niewęgłowski was a lecturer at various universities, including the Academy of Catholic Theology, the Academy of Fine Arts, the Theatre Academy. Since 1997 he was also the head of the Catholic television programmes on the public television