Deníky 1945-1948 – Polívka Václav (2023)

In 2012, unknown and unpublished diaries of Václav Polívka, later Vidar Jensen, were found in Norway in the attic of a house, which he wrote in Czechoslovakia from January 1945 to March 1948. The young man came from an educated family and lived with his parents in a house at Prague Castle, loved classical music, and played the piano and cello himself. He began writing as a seventeen-year-old high school student and continued after the war as a medical student. His diaries are valuable primarily because they provide immediate and authentic testimony about important historical events and the socio-political happenings of the time – from the last year of occupation, including the Prague Uprising, through the post-war period when society was still living in the euphoria of liberation and did not see the approaching danger, to the communist coup in February 1948. At the age of twenty, Václav Polívka clearly saw what was happening in the country and that the development was heading towards a communist dictatorship. In the spring of 1948, he managed to escape from Czechoslovakia and settle in Norway, where he also married his love, whom he met during student trips to Denmark in 1946 and 1947.