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July 25th, 2008
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Events to honor historic protest

Public marks Jan. 16 anniversary of Jan Palach's suicide

By Kimberly Ashton
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
January 16th, 2008 issue

Thirty-nine years after the political protest that stunned the world, photographs and secret police files regarding the incident have still never been published. But three institutions are about to change that.
On Jan. 16, representatives from the National Museum, the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes and Charles University’s Philosophical Faculty announced the start of a program to honor Jan Palach, a 21-year-old student who burned himself to death on Wenceslas Square to protest the communist regime. The program will lead up to next year’s 40th anniversary of the event.
“Not only Czechoslovak society but the whole world was upset and shocked” by the suicide, the Philosophical Faculty says in a press release.
“In January 2007, while commemorating Palach’s anniversary, we found out that there is no proper book about Palach,” says Jakub Jareš of the faculty’s student council. “There is just one published in 1990 and somehow we felt the need to fill in this gap.”
A month prior to next year’s 40th anniversary, a two-volume publication about Palach will be released. The first will include a profile of Palach by historian Petr Blažek, and a study by Polish historian Lukasz Kaminsky of others who burned themselves in protest of communist regimes in the Eastern bloc. The second volume will have documents and photos never before published from the Akce Palach (Operation Palach) files held in the archives of the secret police.
“We talked to the people from the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes and we realized they have so many pictures that have never been published,” Jareš says. The two-volume book pack will include three movies about Palach: Jan 69, Ticho and Příběh Palachova hrobu.
In January 2009, the National Museum will open an exhibit about the self-immolation, and launch a two-day conference examining the act and what followed it.
The program for this week’s Jan. 16 anniversary includes a screening of movies about Palach and an afternoon memorial program in front of the Philosophical Faculty building, where the dean Michal Stehlík will speak on the history of the event.
— Hela Balínová and Naďa Černá contributed to this report.

Kimberly Ashton can be reached at kashton@praguepost.com


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