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Jan Tesař is a left-thinking historian who has been involved in the cultural opposition in Czechoslovakia and after his forced exile also in other countries. He was born in Skuteč on the 2^nd of June, 1933, and studied history at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University. In 1956–1958 and 1961–1969, he worked in the Military Historical Institute. In the meantime, he worked as an unemployed person for his own research, and in 1960 he briefly joined the Pardubice Museum. In 1966 he became a member of the Communist Party, but three years later he stepped out of it. In 1969, he was also arrested for the first time and imprisoned for more than a year, followed by additional arrests and imprisonments in 1972 and in 1979. Jan Tesař was the initiator and one of the founders of the VONS and the "spiritual father" of the regular meetings of Czech and Polish dissidents in Krkonoše. Since 1977 he has been co-publishing the period Dialogy. In 1980, Jan Tesař went into forced exile in Germany and then in France, where he dealt with publishing activities (such as Dialogy, Afgánský zápisník and texts for exile publishing houses) and he sought to coordinate political exile with other socialist countries too. After 1989, he participated in academic and political discussions. Currently, he lives in Slovakia.

Jan Tesař published a number of scholar books, in which he disputes with dominant historiographical interpretations and current myths of Czech/Czechoslovak history. His critical approach has a likeness which is present in the activities of dissents and exiles. His important works include Mnichovský komplex, Zamlčená diagnóza, Traktát o „záchraně národa“, Česká cikánská rapsodie.

Pavel Tigrid is one of the most distinguished Czech journalists of the 20th century. He was not only a writer and publicist, but also a publisher and politician, one of the most prominent representatives of Czechoslovak anti-Communist exile.

Pavel Tigrid, also known by the name Pavel Schönfeld, was born on October 27, 1917 in Prague to a middle-class assimilated Jewish family which was affiliated with writers Antal Stašek and Ivan Olbracht. Already as a student at lyceum, he worked as an editor for the Student Magazine, in which he published his first papers. During his studies, he set up a theatre group of youngsters with his friends where he directed an avant-garde performance. He fled to London in March 1939, where he worked as a broadcaster and editor of the BBC's Czech Broadcasting and editor of the Exile Government’s broadcast, “The Voice of Free Czechoslovakia”. In London, along with W. Bergr, he published Magazines Cultural Notebook and Review 42. After the end of Second World War, he returned to his homeland. In 1945, he briefly worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where he met his future wife, Ivana Myšková, whom he married in 1947. He founded the weekly magazine Obzor with Ivo Ducháček and from 1946 he was the Editor-in-Chief of the weekly magazine for the young generation Development. In February 1948, he was on a reportage tour in West Germany, from which he never returned. Instead, State Security arrested his wife and didn’t release her for three months. After which, she managed to escape to her husband. Pavel Tigrid settled in Germany, where he co-founded the Czechoslovak Relief Committee for Refugees. In addition to this work to help political refugees, he was particularly engaged in journalism. Articles on the situation in Czechoslovakia were published in the German, English and French press. In Munich, he worked for the Free Europe Committee and participated in the preparation of Radio Free Europe broadcasting. He was the first program director of the Czechoslovak editorial office. He resigned in November 1952 after conceptual disagreements with Ferdinand Peroutka and moved to the United States. In 1956 he founded Testimony, an exile quarterly for politics and culture, which became the most important and prestigious magazine of Czech political exile. During the first years, they were located in New York. However, in 1960, Pavel Tigrid relocated to Paris, where he also transferred the quarterly Testimony. After 1968, Pavel Tigrid was deeply involved in the political and cultural dialogue of the afternoon and poster exile. Tigrid was a part of the foundation of many exile activities, among others, he was one of the founding members of the Czechoslovak Exile Documentation Centre of Independent Literature, whose collections are stored in the National Museum. Together with his wife, Ivana, he also organized effective help for representatives of the Czechoslovak opposition.

 He returned to Prague after the Velvet Revolution at the invitation of Václav Havel and then worked in his presidential office. From 1994 to 1996 he held the post of Minister of Culture of the Czech Republic. He was awarded a number of awards from 1995 as well as the Order of T. Masaryk. Until his death, he lived alternatively between France and Bohemia. He died on 31 August 2003 in his home in Héricy, near Paris.

Ivana Tigridova was a journalist and human rights activist, a life partner of the journalist, writer and most prominent representative of the anti-Communist exile of Pavel Tigrid. She was born in Prague on November 4^th, 1925 as Ivana Myšková, to a middle-class artistic family. Her grandmother from her mother's side was Terezie Brzková, one of the most prominent actresses of the First republic. Ivana Tigridová came from a Jewish family, so she had to leave English grammar school in Prague after the arrival of the Nazis. Her father was deported to Terezin first and then to Auschwitz, where he died in January 1945 on a death march. After the war, Ivana graduated from business School, on Resslova Street, where she managed to transfer after her dismissal from grammar school, and in a few months she completed her graduation at the Grammar School in order to take up Law at Charles University, which she did not complete.

In 1945 she met Pavel Tigrid, whom she married in February 1947. In 1947, Pavel Tigrid was followed by the Communist-controlled State Security, and should have been arrested on 23 February 1948. Tigrid was fortunate because he was abroad on a business trip. Ivana Tigridova was arrested shortly after the February 1948 coup and was imprisoned for three months. After her release, she soon escaped to her husband to Germany.

After leaving for emigration, they lived in Germany, where Pavel Tigrid built the Munich branch of Radio Free Europe and became its program director. Ivana began working with him in Radio Free Europe, working in the program department of the Czechoslovakian editorial office preparing the monitoring of the Czechoslovak press. In 1952, they relocated to New York and then to Paris in 1960, where Pavel Tigrid also transferred the quarterly Testimony Magazine, which he founded with his friends in 1956, and from which he became the most influential and successful Czechoslovak exile to start a magazine over time. His wife was also involved in his publishing.

 In the 1970s, Ivana Tigridová began to work more intensively on human rights issues. In November 1974, he founded the Help and Action organisation, supporting persecuted representatives of cultural and political opposition in the Eastern Bloc countries. After the establishment of Charter 77, the creation of an International Committee to Support the Charter 77 Principles in Czechoslovakia was launched in Paris, which helped the Charter 77 signatories in their efforts to implement human and civil rights in the country.

After 1989, Ivana often returned to Prague and helped her husband, who became Advisor to President Václav Havel and later Minister of Culture of the Czech Republic. Ivana Tigridová died on 27 June 2008 in Héricy, Paris, where she had lived with her family for many years.

Pavao Tijan was born in Senj in the Croatian Littoral on June 15, 1908. He was a Croatian political émigré, lexicographer, journalist and columnist. He attended primary and secondary school in his native Senj. He graduated with a degree in Slavic studies at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science in Zagreb in 1930. Initially, he worked in Vukovar as a private instructor for the Eltz family from 1931 to 1934. After that, he became a teacher of the Archdiocesan Classical Gymnasium in Zagreb (1935-1944). In 1938 he began working with Mate Ujević on the Croatian Encyclopaedia project as a member of its Central Committee and as Ujević's deputy chairman and secretary. After the proclamation of the Independent State of Croatia in 1941, he started working in the Croatian Publishing and Bibliographic Institute (HIBZ). He contributed to various journals and magazines, such as Hrvatska prosvjeta, Obzor, and Jutarnji list, for a time he was editor of Hrvatski jezik and Književni tjednik and wrote for the cultural section of Spremnost. He also explored the cultural history of his native Senj and the Croatian coast. As the head of higher education and scientific institutions in the Education Ministry of the Independent State of Croatia, he particularly worked for the establishment of the Faculty of Medicine in Sarajevo in 1944.

He first went to Italy after 1945 to immigrate. Two years later he moved to Spain, where lived the rest of his life. In 1949, with a group of Croatian Catholic intellectuals in Madrid, he launched the journal Osoba i duh. As a university professor, he taught Slavic linguistics in Madrid at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones scientificias. Besides contributing to émigré journals such as Studia Croatica and Hrvatska revija, Tijan was editor of the Croatian program on Spanish National Radio for almost twenty years (1956-1975), where he reported from an anti-communist standpoint on social, political and cultural movements in Croatia under Yugoslav socialism. Likewise, in Spain as a technical editor, he participated in the encyclopaedia project on Spanish cultural history entitled Enciclopedia de la cultura española (1963-1968). He also translated many discussions and works from Croatian culture and literature into Spanish. Tijan died in Madrid on July 2, 1997.

His collection was created spontaneously during his lifetime as an émigré. As an anti-communist intellectual, he opposed the regime in Croatia and Yugoslavia, and considered his own work vital in order to destroy the communist ideology and regime in his country. Because of this commitment, he could only travel to Croatia in the 1990s after democratic changes. He arranged his collection at the end of his life because he wanted to move it to research and cultural institutions in Croatia, so it could serve future generations interested in exploring the history of Croatian anti-communism in the latter half of the 20^th century. His family eventually fulfilled his wish and transferred Tijan's collection to Croatia in 2006.