The historian Jan Tesař began collecting documents on the history of the Second Resistance and recording the memories of anti-Nazi resistance fighters in the mid-1950s. Before completing his history studies at Charles University, he was accepted as a researcher at the Military History Institute in 1956. He was dismissed two years later for political reasons. He then worked briefly at the museum in Pardubice and in 1961 was rehired by the Military History Institute, which he was again forced to leave shortly after the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968. Thanks to Josef Macek, he was then hired by the Historical Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. Not long after that, in September 1969, he was arrested. After 13 months in custody, he was released without trial, and he rejoined the resistance against the regime. In 1971, he was arrested again, and he came back from prison in October 1976. He then became one of the signatories of Charter 77 and initiated the creation of the Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Persecuted (popularly known as VONZ in Czech). In May 1979, he was arrested again, and a year later he accepted an offer to emigrate. He lived first in Germany and later in France. In Paris, he published the Dialogy review from 1983 to 1987, which followed on from the magazine of the same name originally published in samizdat form in Czechoslovakia from 1977. He was editor of the Polish exile monthly Kontakt and collaborated with the Russian émigré magazines Kontinent and Russkaja mysľ. With funds from the Polish exile community, he published the magazine Afgánský zápisník (Afghan Notebook, 1987–1988). From the 1990s, he published Bulletin EIT/AET in Paris (the last issue appeared in 2015).
He has published three monographs covering the tragic decade of Czechoslovak history that began with the Munich Agreement and culminated in the February communist coup: The Munich Complex. Its Causes and Consequences (Prostor 2000), Treatise on the "Rescue of the Nation" – Texts from 1967–1969 on the Beginning of the German Occupation (Triáda 2005) and Czech Gypsy Rhapsody. I–III (Triáda 2016). The third of these, an extensive annotated edition of the memoirs of partisan Josef Serinek, is the culmination of Tesař's work on the history of the Czech partisan movement during World War II.
