Ivan Plicka: in the wrong place at the wrong time during "Palach Week"
It's exactly fifteen years since one of the events that accelerated the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia. January 1989 was the 20th anniversary of the death of Jan Palach, the student who had set himself alight on Prague's Wenceslas Square in protest against the Soviet occupation. All through the week starting from the 15th January thousands of people gathered beneath the statue of Saint Wenceslas with flowers, to remember Palach's sacrifice. Their quiet protest was put down by police in riot gear using water cannon, a gross over-reaction that helped to turn many Czechs against the regime. The young architect Ivan Plicka was a chance witness of the demonstrations that are now known as "Palach Week", and as he now recalls, he almost found himself being arrested.
"Fifteen years ago I was working in an architect's studio not far from Wenceslas Square and that was why there was no problem for me to be during Palach Week on Wenceslas Square every day. The 19th January - it was a Thursday - our first daughter was born early in the morning. So I wanted to go to the maternity hospital to visit my wife. I asked my mother to buy some flowers for me and meet me somewhere in Prague, downtown. So I met her in the upper part of Wenceslas Square in the afternoon, and when I saw my mother coming with a bunch of flowers, I realized that that's perhaps the worst place to meet each other with flowers in town at all, because we were crowded by policemen and people, and the policemen were catching and beating all people with flowers, trying to put their flowers at the Saint Wenceslas statue. So I took the flowers, and hurried to the maternity hospital to visit my wife.
"So I realized that I had prepared a very strange experience for my mother - to be at the wrong time in the wrong place."
