Joined the resistance during the war, got sentenced to 15 years under the Communists
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Jiří Housar was born in Milevsko on 4 February 1921. His parents soon moved to Písek. His father was a chief surveyor and his mother a housewife. He had an older brother Vladimír. He completed primary school and grammar school. He was deployed in Breslau (today’s Wroclaw) at the beginning of the war, working as a file clerk for machine production operations. He returned to Písek in 1942 and taught German at a local school. At the time, he and his brother joined the resistance working with a Prague scout group. They collected military, economic and social intel. In Písek, he witnessed the deportation of the local Jewish community, liberation by the Americans and the arrival of the Red Army. In 1945, Jiří Housar enrolled in law school in Prague, studying remotely as an elementary school teacher. Following February 1948, he was expelled from all universities in the country because of his bourgeois background. He and his brother Vladimír, who had been briefly imprisoned for defamatory anti-communist letters in 1948, formed a four-man dissident group with links to Prague and the American embassy that provided them with radios. In the event of war, they as an intelligence brigade were to send intelligence to the West. However, the Písek group and its Prague part were betrayed by a planted StB agent and the members were arrested on 10 September 1949. Jiří Housar was interrogated in Písek for several months under physical violence. A public trial was held there on 12 May 1950. They were all sentenced to death for treason and espionage; the verdict was later amended to sentences ranging from 11 to 28 years. Jiří Housar went to prison for 15 years and his brother for 28 years. The Housars’ mother was additionally sentenced to two years in a labour camp for poor parenting. Their father was evicted from the house and all the family’s property was confiscated. Jiří Housar was first imprisoned in Pankrác and in Klatovy. He spent most of his sentence in the Jáchymov area in the Svornost and Barbora labour camps, mining uranium ore. He was released on presidential amnesty on 5 May 1960. Until retirement, Housar worked as an auxiliary worker in a car paint shop. His brother Vladimir, also released under the May amnesty, was imprisoned again in 1961 for another four years for failing to report a crime. Jiří Housar received an award as a participant in the anti-communist resistance. He died in Písek in June 2015.
