Jan Tesař, a Czech historian and former dissident who was repeatedly imprisoned by the Communist regime and later forced to emigrate, has died at the age of 92, as confirmed on Facebook yesterday by his colleague Michal Stehlik, director of the Memorial of National Literature.
Tesar was born on 2 June 1933 in Skutec in the Pardubice region, graduated from the Faculty of Arts at Charles University in Prague, and later worked at the Military History Institute.
Until the August 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops, his research work focused mainly on the period of the German occupation. Afterwards, he became involved in the resistance against the emerging “normalisation”, the era of renewed hardline Communist rule.
He was arrested for the first time in 1969 and released without trial after more than a year. He was arrested again in 1971, and sentenced to six years in prison a year later. After his return from prison, he was one of the first signatories of the Charter 77 human rights manifesto and participated in the formation of the Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Prosecuted (VONS).
After further arrests and pressure from the communist secret police (StB), he accepted the regime’s offer to emigrate in 1980. In exile, he worked first in Germany and later in France.
Jan Tesar is the author of ‘The Munich Complex’, which became a loose inspiration for the director and screenwriter Petr Zelenka’s film ‘Lost in Munich’ (2015).
Tesar’s texts from 1967-1969 about the beginning of the German occupation, entitled ‘Treatise on the Rescue of the Nation’, and his three-volume work ‘Czech Gypsy Rhapsody’ were also published. The latter is dedicated to Josef Serinek, a member of the Czech resistance during World War II, who, because of his Roma origin, experienced internment in the concentration camp at Lety u Pisku, South Bohemia.
