Jan Palach's Self-Immolation
A twenty-year-old philosophy student set fire to himself at the top of Wenceslas Square in Prague on 16 January 1969 and died three days later. The Warsaw Pact invasion of the previous August had ended the Prague Spring, and what Jan Palach objected to was not the tanks but what came after: the resignation of the reforms one by one, the reimposition of censorship, and above all the public's acceptance of it. His letter said that a group had decided to protest by burning themselves in turn until certain demands were met — the abolition of censorship and an end to the distribution of the Soviet occupation newspaper — and asked that others follow if they were not. The group probably did not exist, and the letter's purpose was to make the act unrepeatable by one person alone. He was not a political activist and had asked twice to be allowed to study elsewhere. He lived for three days with burns over most of his body and gave a statement to a psychiatrist and a nurse. Some 200,000 people came to the funeral, and the anniversary demonstrations of January 1989 were broken up by police and are known in Czech as Palach Week — one of the events that made November possible. Jan Zajíc did the same thing a month after him, and Evžen Plocek in April. The state removed Palach's body from its grave in 1974 and had it cremated; his ashes were returned in 1990. A cross set into the pavement at the top of the square marks the spot. Vietnamese monks had used the same method in 1963, and it has since been used from Tunisia to Tibet, which is not a tradition anyone set out to found.
- Year: 1969 CE
- Category: Political
