New website presents the life and sacrifice of Jan Palach
Czechoslovak Radio, January 16, 1969: The municipal office of public order in Prague reports that at around 3 p.m. today on Wenceslas Square a 21-year-old arts student, J.P., set himself o n fire. He doused himself with a flammable liquid, set fire to his clothing and suffered serious burns. The fire was extinguished with the speedy assistance of passerby and he was taken to hospital by rescue services for treatment. The motive for the act is under investigation…
The initial report of the self-immolation of Jan Palach five months after the invasion of his country by Warsaw Pact forces is but one of the materials available to the public through a new website launched to commemorate the life and sacrifice of the young activist. The team assembling the collection of documents, reports, essays and films has been at work since 2007 under the auspices of Charles University, and now also under film director Agnieszka Holland – who is preparing a three-part film about Palach for HBO.
“My name is Eva Nachmilnerová, I’m a PhD student at Charles University and I also work at Czech Radio. We got together to create this website because we wanted to not gather one day a year to celebrate the legacy of Jan Palach, but to create something more permanent and to go deeper into his story and create a platform for discussion about him.”
Patrik Eichler is a journalist and writer, and one of the editors of the voluminous commemorative book Jan Palach ’69 which marked the 20th anniversary of Jan Palach’s death two years ago.
The site, as you said, provides a lot of information about the life of Jan Palach; what kind of a person was he?
“Jan Palach was a student of Charles University, a student of history and political economics. He was an active member of the student movement during the 60s, during the Prague Spring. He was the son of a middle class family from a small town about 50 km outside Prague, called Všetaty. But what can we really know about a 20-year-old man? He was a member of Sokol, the Czech athletic organisation, we know his father was a confectioner, his mother was a homemaker, and he had an older brother who studied medicine but went to work in a factory in Northern Bohemia afterwards.”
Patrik Eichler: “I think the main legacy of Jan Palach is political. Jan Palach was interested in politics, and I think his self-immolation was not his first attempt to change the political situation in Czechoslovakia. He was a member of the student council at the school of economics where he studied for his first two years of high school, he participated in the student strike at the end of 1968 and he also made a plan to occupy Czechoslovak Radio and make a public call for public strikes and protests at the end of 1968. His self-immolation was the last step in his attempts in making a difference in Czech politics in the 60s, which began with the beginning of the Prague Spring movement.”
So you feel it was the accumulation of frustration for him after many attempts to make a change?
“I think it was not only frustration. It was a step towards making a difference in politics, in opening up possibilities that were closed during the normalisation period in Czechoslovakia, of cancelling censorship, making free elections possible, and opening up space for culture.”
Eva Nachmilnerová: “What has always appealed to me about Jan Palach is that he had the courage to act, to do something active to protest the passivity and lethargy in society, and he felt he had to do it, even if it was by such drastic means as setting himself on fire. But it was not only an act of desperation. He had real political demands.”
It’s a very drastic way to handle a situation or express oneself. Do you really think it’s a suitable example today, when only ten years ago there was a series of self-immolations in the same location done for the same reason: to protest the situation in the Czech Republic only 30 years later? Is it not actually a dangerous example?
“Yes, it really is a drastic way of expressing oneself or making a political point. But I think it was specific to the time and the regime in which Jan Palach acted. He was forced by these factors to take this drastic act. I can’t imagine how horrible the state of moral decline must have been in society, and he felt something had to be done. I think we can’t understand how he – or others, like Jan Zajíc – felt.
“You asked about what people should take from the website. I think it’s not just the historical information or the knowledge of Jan Palach and the historical contact. Our aim was to make people ask themselves more general questions, essential questions that arise from the act and story of Jan Palach, like ‘have I done any good for others’ and ‘what kind of life do I live’. I thinkj the moral impact of his act was very important to us.”
