Unbearable Denunciation

A Czech institute has published a police report claiming that Milan Kundera denounced a spy named Miroslav Dvoracek to the Communist police in 1950.  Kundera vehemently denies the charge.

Dvoracek, the story goes, had left Czekoslovakia in 1948, and was living in Germany when he was recruited by the US to spy for them.  He was sent back to his country.  While on a visit to Prague, he left a suitcase in a friend’s dorm room; the friend told her boyfriend; the boyfriend told Kundera; and Kundera allegedly whent to the police. Dvoracek was arrested and later sentenced to 22 years in prison.  The AFP reports:

Kundera denied he ever reported on Dvoracek’s whereabouts.

“I didn’t know the man at all,” he told the CTK news agency.

Kundera, who has refused to speak to the press for years, said the institute and the media had committed “an attack on an author,” adding that the police document discovered by the historians was a mystery to him.

He said “my memory has not tricked me, I did not work for the secret police.”

Dvoracek is now 80 years old and lives in Sweden. Who knows what really happened? A document is such an easy thing to produce. The truth is a little harder to ascertain.