Jan Palach

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Image:Palach-Zajic-memorial.jpg Jan Palach (August 11, 1948 – January 19, 1969) was a Czech student who committed suicide by self-immolation as a political protest.

The Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 was designed to crush the liberalising reforms of Alexander Dubček's government during the Prague Spring. Palach died after setting himself on fire in Wenceslas Square in Prague, Czechoslovakia on 16 January 1969 in protest.

The funeral of Palach turned into a major protest against the occupation, and a month later (on 25 February 1969) another student, Jan Zajíc, burned himself to death in the same place, followed in April of the same year by Evžen Plocek in the city Jihlava. Apart from immediate shock, these suicides didn't have a lasting impact on the political situation in Czechoslovakia.

A few months earlier, on 8 September 1968, a Pole, Ryszard Siwiec had immolated himself in Warsaw during a harvest festival in protest against Warsaw Pact aggression in Czechoslovakia and Polish participation in it. Siwiec died in hospital care four days later, 12 September. It has not been established that Palach knew about this act of protest, as it was completely concealed by the Polish communist authorities. However, numerous Czechoslovaks attended the festival in Warsaw, and news may have traveled by word of mouth. The first Western news reports about it were broadcast by Radio Free Europe two months after Palach's death.

Image:Placa Jan Palach.JPG

The so called Palach Week took place on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of Palach's death. It was a series of anticommunistic demonstrations in Prague between 15 and 21 January 1989, suppressed by the police, which preceded the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia 11 months later.

After the Velvet Revolution, Palach (along with Zajíc) was commemorated in Prague by a bronze cross embedded at the spot where he fell outside the National Museum, as well as a square named in his honour. The Czech astronomer Luboš Kohoutek, who left Czechoslovakia the following year, named an asteroid which had been discovered on August 22, 1969, after Jan Palach (1834 Palach). There are several other memorials to Palach in cities throughout Europe, including a small memorial inside the glacier tunnels beneath the Jungfraujoch in Switzerland.

Several later incidences of self-immolation have or may have been influenced by the example of Palach and his popularity in the media. In the spring of 2003, a total of six young Czechs burned themselves to death, notably the secondary school student Zdeněk Adamec who burned himself on 6 March 2003 on almost the same spot in front of the National Museum, leaving a suicide note on a webpage explicitly referring to Palach and the others who had committed suicide in 1969. Reasons for such a wave of suicides are unclear.

[edit] References in the arts

The song "Club Foot" by the band Kasabian is dedicated to Palach.

Palach is mentioned in The Stranglers' bassist, Jean-Jacques Burnel's solo album of 1979, 'Euroman Cometh.' In the track 'Euromess,' a song about the liberalisation of Czechoslovakia in the 1960s and then its subsequent 'normalisation', Burnel pleads: "Don't forget young Jan Palach, he burnt a torch against the Warsaw pact".

Palach was mentioned in the play 'Wenceslas Square' by Larry Shue.