The Story of the Burning Torch of Jan Palach 

“From Stettin in the Baltic, to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent,”

Winston Churchill,

on March 5, 1946, at Westminster College in Fulton

After the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963, in 1968 Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, too. Those are the two big shocked assassinations in the Western world. During that time some incidents happened in the Eastern world, and the environment of the Eastern world was not silent at all.

In 1968, one of the biggest incidents occurred in Czechoslovakia which is called the Prague Spring. The Prague Spring was a strong attempt by Dubček to grant additional rights to the citizens of Czechoslovakia in an act of partial decentralization of the economy and democratization. The Soviet Bolsheviks did not like that because liberalization and wanting democracy could be evaluated seen as a first step toward capitalism. Many viewed it as a bridge between East and West and a hopeful example of co-existence between socialism and Western democracy but, Bolsheviks did not share the same thoughts with them also, they see that the Prague Spring as a threat because it can be spread to the other countries in Eastern world. Because of that the Prague Spring ended with occupying by the Soviets and by other Warsaw Pact allies (except Romania) invaded the country. The Prague Spring ended in August 1968.

However, the invasion of Bolsheviks into Czechoslovakia did not stop the demands of people for liberalization. In 1969, one of the Czech students who was Jan Palach decided to sacrifice himself and he set himself on fire in Wenceslas Square. Unfortunately, he was not rescued, he passed away. The funeral of Palach turned into a silent demonstration against the occupation. A month later (on 25 February), another student, Jan Zajíc, burned himself to death in the same place. After that several people decided to sacrifice themselves to evoke people. Those people, set themselves to burn to death and they became a symbol of Czechoslovakian history to protest the military occupation.

You can visit his memorial in Prague and see candles lit in his memory in different parts of Wenceslas Square in Prague today.