We are, in part, what we remember.
We are, in part, our past.
At any given moment we act on the basis of, in large part, what we remember
and you cannot artificially amputate certain part of history.
Otherwise, we are not able to build for ourselves a decent, dignified future.
This is why it is important.
OSA stands for Open Society Archives. Originally this was the collection of Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty.
So we have an archive here which has materials in 32 languages, with documents related to
violations of human rights, mass graves, ethnic cleansing.
We have the archive of the International Helsinki Federation, which was a predecessor of Human Rights Watch.
The archive of Index on Censorship which is the most important journal devoted to freedom
of expression, freedom of the media.
We have tens of thousands of films.
Nazi propaganda films, the most horrific anti-Semitic propaganda films from the 1930's.
We have American anti-communist films from the 1950's.
Soviet propaganda films from the 1920's, and so on.
This is the main repository of OSA. A few years back we used to call it the grave of communism.
But it's also the repository of human rights violations and war crimes.
This is a collection of amateur photographs from 1989, taken from the only company for
developing films. The giant mammoth company run by the state.
As far as we know, this was also a way for the communist party and the then government
to control private activities of the people.
We have over 140,000 amateur photographs an imprint of the Hungarian society of 1989,
the year of transition from communism to democracy.
I feel a deep sadness when looking at these photos because of what the environment looked like.
Because of the way we celebrated our family events.
Because of the way we lived 20 something years ago although perhaps at that time this was not so obvious.
We are not only and archive, but more like a laboratory. We are really interested in
ourselves, we are self-reflective. We are interested about the nature of documents.
And you can use the archive even without coming to us. It is a tool for scholar, for researchers,
for students, for forensic or legal purposes.
For human rights organizations working under extremely dangerous circumstances.
So when the police raids the offices of the human right organization in Chechnya or Zimbabwe,
they do not find anything.
You can in this way, merge physically dispersed archives and recreate in this digital universe
physical archives that are dispersed in different physical locations in the world.
Issue of the past, because of its horrific nature, is still around us somehow it's hovering above our head.
The fact that something happened already is not a guarantee against its return.
As a historian, my duty is to try to help all of us to understand what we did in the
past, what happened to us.
To learn as much as possible from it. To understand what's happening to us when it happens.
You have to live with the feeling that anything can happen again and again and again.