Bulcsú Veress had Romanian Hungarian heritage, but was born and raised in Budapest, Hungary. In 1956, he took part in the revolution and was imprisoned for eight months. He subsequently managed to become a student of Law at ELTE University in Budapest, and after having completed his studies, he joined the state administration. In 1970, Veress did not return to Hungary after having done a postgraduate course in Strasbourg, and he settled in the United States. He obtained a master’s degree in political science and international relations from Columba University in New York, and in 1976, he became a founding member of and activist for the newly established Committee for Human Rights in Romania. In 1980, Veress became a human rights consultant for Democratic Senator Christopher J. Dodd, and he started traveling regularly to Washington to advocate on behalf of the Hungarian minority in the Congress. Veress became an irreplaceable resource for CHRR/HHRF due to his deep understanding of the U.S. political system and the internal procedures of the U.S. Congress.

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Lokacija:
- Budapest, Hungary
- New York, United States

Vermes, Géza

Géza Vermes (1924–2013) was a British religious-historian. He was born in Makó (Hungary), to Jewish parents, both of whom were killed in the Holocaust. Vermes survived thanks to Catholic institutes that hid him. Later, he joined the Fathers of Notre-Dame de Sion. He became a Catholic priest after World War II, and studied Eastern languages and history at the Saint Albert College and the Catholic University of Leuven, in Belgium. In 1953 he became a doctor of theology. In 1957 he left his church and moved to Great Britain, where he worked as a professor at the University of Newcastle. From 1965 he taught at Oxford University. In 1970 he joined a Jewish community in London.

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Veselý, Aleš

Aleš Veselý was a Czech sculptor, graphic designer, painter, and a representative of Czech Informalism. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. In 1960, he organised the private exhibition Confrontation II in his studio, where he exhibited the works of artists, including himself, who were followers of Informalism. The work of these actors was radically different to that of the official cultural policy. Aleš Veselý’s first solo exhibition was held in 1963 at the Umělecká Beseda Gallery of Young Artists. From 1967 to 1968, during the Symposium of Simple Forms in Ostrava, he created his most famous sculpture, Kaddish (also known under the title A Prayer for the Dead). He was banned from exhibiting during Normalization and lived privately. He focused mainly on monumental works where he turned to the roots of Judaism and the search for the meaning of existence. He began to exhibit his work again after 1989. He taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and at the J. E. Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem. He created several sculptures across the globe.

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Lokacija:
- Praha, Prague, Czech Republic
- Středokluky, Czech Republic

Vianu, Ion

Ion Vianu (b. 15 April 1934), a Romanian psychiatrist and writer, is the son of Tudor Vianu, a prominent literary historian and critic. Ion Vianu is best known for his instrumental contribution to the unmasking of the misuses of psychiatry in communist Romania. In 1952, he began his studies in classical philology at the University of Bucharest. He did not consider himself to have a natural talent for classical literary studies, and thus he abandoned philology for medicine. Another reason for his decision to radically change his career was that he thought that in contrast to the humanities, which were aggressively subjected to political control, a doctor would enjoy some degree of independence. According to his testimony, he hoped that his decision would help him “live as a free man in that sea of obedience and oppression which was Romanian society” (Călinescu and Vianu 2006, 14–101).

After graduating from the University of Medical Studies in 1962, he followed a university career in the field of psychiatry. During the short period of political relaxation in the mid-1960s, Ion Vianu was able to travel to the German Democratic Republic and even to France on a scholarship offered by the World Health Organisation. In spite of the temptation to settle abroad, he returned to Romania as he believed that he could make a difference in his professional field and change the situation of the country for the better (Călinescu and Vianu 2006, 193–223). Indeed Ion Vianu became a well-known and respected psychiatrist. The results of his medical research were comprised in a volume entitled Introduction to Psychotherapy, which was published in 1975. His relations with the communist regime became rather tense as he refrained from becoming a Party member, as most Romanians did taking into account the advantages attached to Party membership, and from becoming an informer of the Romanian secret police, the Securitate. On the contrary, Ion Vianu decided to reveal how his profession was turned into a tool of repression against those who decided to speak against the regime. Based on his direct experience, he published in 1976, an article entitled “Psychiatry, anti-psychiatry, hyper-psychiatry,” in which he implied that psychiatry and psychiatrists were used in Romania for political purposes. Although he did not explicitly denounce psychiatric repression, the article illustrated that some doctors would diagnose the public critics of the communist regime as having mental diseases, contributing to their forced admission to psychiatric hospitals, where they could be isolated and kept under strict surveillance. (Călinescu and Vianu 2006, 234–239, 340–341, 345; C Petrescu 2013, 132–133).

Shortly after, in February 1977, Ion Vianu applied for an emigration visa. However, before leaving the country, he and his friend, Ion Negoițescu, joined the emerging movement for human rights, which the writer Paul Goma initiated in January 1977 following the model of Charter 77. Disregarding any personal risks that his actions might attract, Vianu wrote a letter of support to Paul Goma, which also reached the international media, making this position publicly known. Moreover, with Paul Goma’s support, Ion Vianu wrote another open letter in which he explicitly denounced the use of psychiatry as a political tool against the opponents of the communist regime. As a result, the communist authorities subjected his nine-year-old child to brutal treatment and urged the University of Medical Studies to fire him. Besides losing his position, Vianu came to be investigated for proliferating defamatory statements in the above-mentioned article. Due to international protests, Ion Vianu was eventually allowed to emigrate, but not before the commander of the Foreign Intelligence Directorate of the Securitate himself, General Nicolae Pleșită, had threatened him, reminding him that this institution had the capacity to reach the “enemies of the regime” even in Western countries. Vianu and his family left Romania on 28 July 1977 to finally settle in Switzerland (Călinescu and Vianu 2006, 346-356).

In exile, Ion Vianu worked as psychiatrist and joined the Swiss Association against the Political Use of Psychiatry, which aimed at raising the awareness of the international public opinion about the abuse and misuse of psychiatry not only in the USSR and the Soviet bloc, but also in other dictatorial regimes across the world. At the same time, Vianu continued to denounce the abuses committed by the Romanian communist regime in psychiatric hospitals and the misuse of medical practitioners to silence political dissidents (Vianu 1979). He ceaselessly testified to such cases that he had witnessed while a psychiatrist in communist Romania in front of various Western institutions, such as the European Parliament, or non-governmental organisations, such as Amnesty International, standing out as a defender of human rights and an opponent of the Ceaușescu regime.

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Lokacija:
- Bucharest, Romania

Viczián, István

István Viczián is a Hungarian geologist and professor. He was born in 1940 in Budapest. He graduated from the Faculty of Natural Science at the Eötvös Loránd University of Sciences in geology (1963) and physics (1966). He worked in the Hungarian National Institute of Geology from 1963 to 2002. He became doctor of geoscience in 1988. He taught at the University of Debrecen from 1996, and he is now a private docent at the university and emeritus consultant in the Institute of Geology. He has been a member of the presbytery of the Calvinist Congregation of Pasarét since 1970.

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Lokacija:
- Budapest, Hungary