50 years since the protest of Jan Palach

50 years since the protest of Jan Palach

Fifty years ago on January 16, Jan Palach, a young Czech university student set himself on fire at the Wenceslas Square in Prague. He did this as an act of protest against the 1968 Soviet Troops invasion into Czechoslovakia. Palach died on 19 January 1969 at the age of 20. According to Ivan Kamenec, a historian at the Slovak Academy of Sciences, Palach's sacrifice was the result of despair, which stunned the society. In an act of solidarity, thousands of people across the then Czechoslovak republic went on hunger strikes; in Bratislava this concerned 19 students of the Arts Faculty. Among the "human torches" who followed Palach's example of self-immolation was also the 19 year old soldier Michal Lefčík, who set himself on fire in April 1969 in Košice. On the 20th anniversary of Palach's death, in January 1989, the series of anticommunist demonstrations which were suppressed by the police are considered one of the catalysts that led to the Velvet Revolution and the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia.


Zuzana Botiková, Photo: Wikimedia.org/Ijon

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