The Sanda Budiș Collection was initiated and subsequently developed by the collector after she settled in Switzerland in 1973. It comprises documents produced from 1973 until 2007. The collection consists of materials related to her work and that of other personalities in the Romanian exile community dating from the period when Romania was under communist dictatorship, as well as documents related to her involvement, together with other Romanians, in rebuilding democracy in her home country after the collapse of the communist regime. Hence, these documents represent an important historical source for the history of the Romanian exile community.
In particular, this collection illustrates the intellectual evolution of Sanda Budiș, a Romanian architect who asserted herself beginning in 1973, when she first disseminated information about the violations of human rights in Nicolae Ceaușescu's Romania through letters and memoirs to Western political decision-makers, as well as to international organisations. Later on, she became actively involved in the organisation and activity of the Romanian exile community, adhering to a number of existing anti-communist associations and organisations and contributing to the establishment of new ones. Especially in the 1980s, she stood out for her struggle against the massive destruction of historic monuments in the country and of the Romanian villages, an activity carried out within the Association for the Protection of Villages, Monuments and Historic Sites in Romania, based in Switzerland. The Association, to the foundation of which she also contributed, was founded on 10 May 1989 in Romanel-sur-Lausanne (Switzerland). Among other activities, it dealt, from its very beginning, with the establishment of partnerships between Swiss and Romanian villages, organised by Opération Villages Roumains (OVR). This association was founded in December 1988 in Belgium with the aim of adopting all 13,123 villages to save them from the destruction planned by the Romanian communist authorities. OVR developed greatly in just a few months, immediately setting up OVR committees also in France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, Great Britain, Italy, Spain, Norway, and Denmark. Basically, OVR followed an already existing model in post-war Western Europe aimed at creating partnerships between localities with a similar economic and geographic profile in order to find local development opportunities through joint efforts, as well as fostering transnational solidarity. Even though there were partnerships with localities in Eastern Europe, OVR had no match in the communist bloc, considering the magnitude and speed of its evolution. Therefore, given the involvement of Sanda Budiș in this European project, her personal archive contains a series of documents concerning the systematisation of the Romanian villages, as well as the Western intervention aiming at stopping this plan.
After the fall of the communist regime in Romania in 1989, Sanda Budiş was also involved in rebuilding democracy in her native country. Since 1990, she has often returned to Romania – without settling there – and has been involved in a series of projects. One of the most important was the support of young Romanian peasants for carrying out internships in Switzerland in order to practice modern agriculture, but also to experience a society with democratic values. The aim was to import good practices into Romania from the moral, civic, and agricultural points of view. Her activity in this respect can be assessed from the documents contained in the collection, which includes projects, personal sheets, internship contracts, activity reports, statutes, projects, and extracts from newspapers concerning the activity of the Association for the Restoration of an Independent and Free Peasant Romania.
The original documents and various publications in the collection are of particular importance for documenting and understanding the activity of the post-war Romanian exile community. In this respect, the Sanda Budiș Collection includes a number of exile publications, which though even they are only disparate and incomplete numbers, or extracts from them, nevertheless help one outline their profile as well as that of the Romanians abroad who published in their pages. The importance of these newspapers and magazines also derives from their analysis of Romania's internal political, economic, cultural, and social situation under the communist dictatorship, as well as after the collapse of the communist regime in 1989. These analyses are useful today in achieving a better view of the period. To these may be added some foreign publications that Sanda Budiș purchased before and after 1989, which focused on communist or post-communist Romania. In other words, the documents in the Sanda Budiș Collection help one document the activity of organisations and associations established in Romania after 1989 in order to support democratic consolidation in this country. In this respect, the Sanda Budiş Collection includes statutes, minutes, activity reports, reports, essays, calls, conventions, balances, agendas, invitations, and correspondence.
All the documents in the collection were donated by Sanda Budiș to the National Institute for the Memory of the Romanian Exile (INMER). They were opened for research in January 2008. The donation of this personal collection was possible due to the initiative of INMER, headed by Dinu Zamfirescu at that time, to identify, acquire and preserve such collections in order to open them for researchers and the general public.
