In April 1942, the Czech journalist Julius Fučík was arrested by the German Gestapo for his activities as an anti-Nazi activist of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.

Fluctuating between testimony and self-reflection, the work deals dramatically and emotively with anti-Nazi resistance, interrogations, and the personalities of fellow inmates and prison guards.

After the war, Fučík's wife Gusta met Kolínský and arranged with Ladislav Štoll, the communist literary critic and later Czechoslovakian minister of education and culture, to collect and publish the smuggled notes.

[1] In the first edition, Gusta Fučíková left out certain passages from the manuscript, where Fučík had described the 'high game' he played with the Gestapo and outlined his interrogations.

[citation needed] A fully critically edition of the Notes published in 1995, however, dispelled the rumours that its author had betrayed the cause: his behaviour was not conspiratorial in nature.

[4] In 2008, Otto Press in Prague published a facsimile copy of the manuscript with a foreword by the Czech writer Zdeněk Mahler.