Palach’s death was not a suicide driven by desperation

Jakub Schwarz Trojan was a pastor in Neratovice-Libiš, close to Prague. One of his parishioner’s was also Jan Palach. Trojan recollects how he saw him at Christmas of 1968. “He visited the choir with his mother. He had this unusual face, which emanated something extraordinary, he was quite pale, he was just sitting, and then he also took part in the Lord’s Supper,” he recalled. As the men were parting, Palach told the pastor that the Churches should be doing something, given the circumstances. Two weeks later, Palach attended his uncle’s funeral, where Trojan had preached sermon: “I was preaching a text from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount about the beatified who suffer for justice.” Shortly after that, on 16th January, Jan Palach burnt himself to death at Wenceslas Square. According to Trojan’s recollections, the death of Jan Palach did not lead to discussions in the Catholic or Evangelic Church, whether Palach can have a Christian funeral: “Both Churches were of one mind, that it wasn’t a suicide driven by desperation, which is the usual characteristic of suicide. We perceive it as an escape from the constraining circumstances of life, which a person is unable to cope with, so he or she decides to end their life. In this case, it was obvious, the reason was different. It was self-destruction as a sign for all of us to do something positive, which could help the entire Czech public to preserve its basic goods – freedom, democracy...” In this sense Mr Trojan preached at Jan Palach’s funeral, which turned into a genuine national manifestation: “Prague had probably never seen so many people lining the streets. Possibly about two hundred thousand people had come to the Old Town Square. The emotion and power emanating from the people, was something truly unbelievable.” The coffin containing Palach’s body was displayed from Friday January 24th, 1969, in the Karolinum, where tens of thousands of people had come to pay their respect to the deceased student. In the morning, on January 25th, 1969, the remembrance ceremony continued. Shortly after noon, in the courtyard of the Karolinum the funeral service had started. On the same day, in the afternoon, the family and the closest friends of Jan Palach parted with him at the Olšany cemetery.