The Student Who Set Himself Alight In Protest

In August 1968 half a million Warsaw Pact troops rolled into Czechoslovakia to end the Prague Spring. Alexander Dubček’s reforms — ‘socialism with a human face’, a free press, an end to travel restrictions — were dismantled inside a fortnight. By the end of that year the country was in what Czechs called ‘normalisation’: the frontier closed, the newspapers censored again, and the population moving through the motions of daily life under a Soviet-installed government. What Jan Palach later wrote in the letter he left in a briefcase on the pavement of Wenceslas Square was that this was the worst part. Not the invasion. The way people were quietly getting used to it. Palach was 20. He was a first-year student at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague, studying history and political economy. He had grown up in the small town of Všetaty, forty kilometres north of the capital, in a family that ran a small confectionery shop that the communists had nationalised in 1948. His father died when Jan was 13. His mother worked in a food factory. Fellow students remembered him as reserved, deeply serious, and — after August 1968 — increasingly unable to sleep. In the autumn of that year he wrote to the Czech Union of Students, and then to the Writers’ Union, urging a general strike. Nothing came of it. In the weeks before 16 January 1969 he formed, with a very small circle, a plan for a chain of self-immolations designed to jolt the country out of what he called ‘the resigned mood’. He was Torch Number One. The letter left in his briefcase, addressed to the Czechoslovak public, listed demands: an end to press censorship, the banning of the Soviet occupation newspaper Zprávy. It ended, in his handwriting, ‘Our nation stands at the edge of hopelessness. We have decided to express our protest in a way that will shake the conscience of society. Our group consists of volunteers who are ready to burn themselves for our cause. I had the honour of drawing lot number one, and thus have obtained the right to write the first letters and to set the first torch.’

The Horror

At about 2:30 on the afternoon of Thursday 16 January 1969 he walked out of the tram at the top of Wenceslas Square, in front of the neo-Renaissance bulk of the National Museum. He set down the briefcase, took a plastic canister of petrol from a coat pocket, poured it over his head and shoulders, dropped the coat, and struck a match. He was seen by dozens of afternoon shoppers. He ran, on fire, down the wide stone steps of the museum toward the tram line, waving people away when they tried to smother the flames with their coats. A tram conductor named Jaroslav Špringl finally reached him with a heavy overcoat, put him down and beat the flames out. Palach had burns over 85 percent of his body. He was taken by ambulance to the Faculty Hospital on Legerova Street. The doctors gave him no chance. He remained conscious for the whole of the first day. That afternoon and evening he was interviewed by two journalists and by a psychology student named Zdenka Kmuníčková, who was able to enter the ward disguised as a nurse. He told her over and over again the same thing: this was not despair, this was not suicide, this was protest. He named other members of his group. He asked that they be told not to burn themselves. ‘My act,’ he told her, ‘has fulfilled its purpose. It is not necessary for anyone else to do this.’ He died at 3:30 in the afternoon on Sunday 19 January 1969, from renal failure caused by the burns. His funeral, on 25 January, was one of the largest public demonstrations Prague has ever seen — some estimates put it at 600,000 people lining a five-kilometre route from Charles University to Olšany Cemetery. In 1973 the regime, uneasy at the pilgrimages to his grave, ordered his body exhumed at night, cremated against the family’s wishes, and the ashes returned to his mother’s cemetery in Všetaty on condition that they not be marked. In 1990, after the Velvet Revolution, his ashes were returned to Olšany and reburied under a bronze death-mask marker. In the twenty years between his death and 1989, February and January became the two months in which the secret police could count on protests and arrests around Wenceslas Square. Palach was not alone. On 25 February 1969 an 18-year-old student named Jan Zajíc set himself alight in a passageway off the same square. On 4 April 1969 a factory worker named Evžen Plocek did the same in Jihlava. Both died. Historians of the period — including Petr Blažek, whose 2019 biography of Palach is the standard reference — have argued that his act failed in its immediate political aim (the regime remained in power for another twenty years) but succeeded in giving the resistance a face that could not be censored out. On the tenth anniversary of his death, in January 1979, Václav Havel and other dissidents were arrested for laying flowers at his memorial. In January 1989 the demonstrations known as ‘Palach Week’ — brutally broken up by the police — were the direct forerunner of the Velvet Revolution that November.

The Modern Relic

The exact spot where he set himself alight — on the pavement in front of the National Museum, in Wenceslas Square, Prague 1 — is marked today by a bronze cross set into the ground, lying flat and slightly raised as if the pavement itself had heaved beneath it. Beside it is a small memorial plaque listing his name, Jan Zajíc’s, and Evžen Plocek’s. Palach’s death-mask, cast in bronze the day after he died, is displayed at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University where he studied — the building on Jan Palach Square, renamed in his honour after 1989. His grave is at Olšany Cemetery in Prague. The Legerova Street hospital where he lay for three days is still a working hospital. On 16 January every year, since 1990, a wreath is laid on the cross at the top of Wenceslas Square. This year it will be laid for the 57th time.

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