Some very intriguing notebook pages were sent to me by a reader named Khang, with this background information:

A friend of mine recently sent me several notebooks entries written by Vietnamese and French soldiers aboard the Kilinski, a Polish cargoship. Following the end of fighting in 1954, the ship made trips between North and South Vietnam transporting troops and supplies.

The pages seem to have writing in Vietnamese and French and Arabic (presumably from a Moroccan or Algerian soldier with the French forces), in which the French and Vietnamese soldiers are celebrating the end of the war and leaving messages of friendship and brotherhood to their Polish shipmates. One of the pages written in Vietnamese seems to have been rewritten in French by someone else– the message notes that the writer, a doctor in the People’s Army of Vietnam, felt “at home” on the ship and that the Poles were “our people.”

Running over two of the pages is a poem celebrating peace. I can’t make out the signature but I think the author is a French soldier rather than a Vietnamese soldier writing in French. It’s a bit hard to read all the handwriting, but if I am interpreting it correctly, a few lines say something like

And you, comrade workers:
It’s time to temper the steel;
And you, comrade fighters:
Beware, there are discontented ones;
And you, comrade [executives? leaders?];
You must work, learn;
And finally you little ones, men of the future:
Study so that so much effort is not in vain.

Reading this in hindsight, the optimism of peacetime seems bittersweet. Based on what little I know of the First Indochina War, it wouldn’t be too long before conflict escalated again, eventually turning into the Vietnam War in which those “men of the future” (and the United States) became involved.

A big thank you to Khang for sharing this fascinating piece of notebook history!