Man in iconic photograph from 1968 invasion of Prague identified 58 years later
A photograph of a wounded young man lying outside Czechoslovak Radio on August 21, 1968, became one of the striking images of the Soviet-led invasion. After 58 years, Memory of Nations organization has identified him as Jaroslav Mareček. The Soviet bullet remains lodged in his leg to this day, although for decades he did not know it was there.
Memory of Nations identified Jaroslav Mareček after appealing to the public for help. A former classmate of Mareček’s brother provided information that led researchers to the man in the photograph. Mareček, born in 1949, was 18 when Warsaw Pact forces invaded Czechoslovakia.
From Wenceslas Square to the radio building
A trained car mechanic, Jaroslav Mareček went to Wenceslas Square on the morning of August 21, 1968. Three tanks were moving through the square as gunfire echoed around him and exhaust fumes stung his eyes. At one point, he pushed a piece of scaffolding pipe into the tracks of a moving tank. “The pipe went into the wheels, the tank stopped and a soldier looked out,” Mareček recalls. The soldier then ducked back inside, the engine roared and a broken piece of the pipe flew through the air.
Mareček continued towards Czechoslovak Radio on Vinohradská Street, where tanks carrying soldiers were advancing through crowds of protesters. People threw paving stones, apples and anything else they could find. Outside the radio building, they tried unsuccessfully to overturn a tram. “The wheels must have lifted a metre off the ground, but we couldn’t tip it over. There was gunfire all around us. It was like being at the front,” he says.
Mareček remembers a woman leaning from an upper-floor window of the radio building and chanting Alexander Dubček’s name. A soldier fired a burst in her direction, sending dust and pieces of the façade into the air. Mareček thought she had been hit, but when the dust cleared, she began shouting “Dubček! Dubček!” again. He also saw an unidentified man emerge from the radio building carrying papers and climb onto a tank. “I saw the officer sitting on the tank pull out a pistol and shoot him. The man fell back into the crowd. I was about ten metres away,” Mareček says.
Nearby, people pushed a bus into the road to block the tanks. A truck carrying cement then drove into their path while soldiers fired at its cab. Mareček climbed onto the bus but soon realised how exposed he was and jumped down. Two tanks were eventually set on fire after protesters punctured fuel barrels mounted above their engines. When soldiers tried to extinguish the flames with tarpaulins, Mareček and others pulled the coverings away. Ammunition soon began exploding inside the vehicles.
Shot while fleeing up Balbínova Street
A line of armed soldiers then advanced through Balbínova Street. Mareček joined about 15 people running uphill, but the entrances to the surrounding buildings were packed, leaving them nowhere to hide. “I was running and saw people falling close to me,” he recalls. Ahead of him was Hedvika Pavelková, a 20-year-old employee of a nearby antiquarian bookshop, who was shot in the leg. Only four or five people from the original group were still running when Mareček was hit. “It didn’t even hurt. I simply felt a tingling sensation in my leg, but the leg had gone limp. When I tried to put my weight on it, I collapsed,” he says.
Pavelková lay screaming a few metres away. As gunfire continued, Mareček rolled towards a wall, but bullets striking the buildings sent pieces of plaster and roof tiles falling around him. He then saw another line of soldiers approaching. “One of them had his weapon pointed at me. He looked at me and simply stepped over me,” Mareček recalls. Looking down the street, he saw about 15 wounded people lying on the ground. A police officer crawled over, tore open Mareček’s trousers and bandaged both legs. Shortly afterwards, mathematician and photographer Miroslav Hlaváček took the photograph that would become one of the enduring images of the invasion.
Seven months of rehabilitation
Mareček was taken away in an ambulance whose windows had been shot through. Seven other wounded people were gradually loaded inside. A tank blocked the ambulance on its way to the hospital and nearly crushed it against a wall. At the hospital on Londýnská Street, doctors simply stitched Mareček’s wounds closed, although one bullet had passed through a bone and damaged the nerves. He later required specialist surgery at Prague’s Central Military Hospital.
For three days, his parents had no idea where he was. His father searched morgues for a young man wearing grey trousers and a blue sweater. “My father aged by at least three years because of that,” Mareček says. He later spent seven months at the Kladruby Rehabilitation Institute. After three months, he discovered that he could move his big toe again. Eventually, movement returned to all his toes and he was able to resume a normal life.
In 2010, an X-ray following a skiing injury revealed another surprise: a bullet was still lodged in his calf bone. He had carried it for 42 years without knowing it was there. “I limp a little, but otherwise we live normally, do sports and are fine,” Jaroslav Mareček says.
