Fiery resistance

Before I leave Timothy Garton Ash's Homelands behind, I wanted to share this smidgen of reporting in which he captures the flavor of life in a country whose rulers work to erase reality and replace it with fiction that suits them. 

In Czechoslovakia, Orwell was compounded by a touch of Kafka. On a chilly Tuesday in January 1984, I visited the Olšany cemetery in Prague, just across the road from the Jewish graveyard where Franz Kafka lies.

I was looking for the grave of a woman called Marie Jedličková. Quite often, people would light candles and leave flowers on this grave, with messages such as ‘We remember’. These would rapidly be cleared away by ‘persons unknown’.

Who was Marie Jedličková? No one could tell me. All those mourners knew was that a man called Jan Palach had previously been buried in this place.

Palach was a Czech student who, in 1969, at the age of twenty, set fire to himself on Wenceslas Square in protest against the Soviet invasion and occupation of his country. He subsequently died of his wounds. His grave had become a site of pilgrimage.

So one night the authorities removed his body, had it cremated and delivered his ashes in an urn to his mother in her country town. Then they buried an old woman from a care home, Marie Jedličková, in his place in the Prague cemetery.

But those who wished to honour Jan Palach would not be cheated, so they placed their tokens of remembrance on the grave of Marie J. What was it the exiled Czech novelist Milan Kundera had recently written in his Book of Laughter and Forgetting? ‘The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.’

Self-immolation as a form of protest of the intolerable was a feature of the mid-1960s, worldwide. Several Buddhist monks in Vietnam set fire to themselves in 1963 in protest against a Roman Catholic government imposed by the Americans and the French. In the United States, Alice Herz, an 82 year old German-Jewish refugee become a peace activist and Unitarian, set herself on fire in Detroit in 1965 in protest of President Lyndon Johnson's escalation in Vietnam. The same year, the Quaker Norman Morrison immolated himself outside Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's office and the Catholic Worker Roger Allen LaPorte also set himself ablaze outside the United Nations headquarters.

Horrible as these acts seem, they do seem less generally harmful than picking up an AR-15. 

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Before I completely leave behind Timothy Garten Ash's memoir, I do want to point to his fascinating collection of mostly personal snapshots from his eastern European wanderings, available online. Here's Ash with Czech president Vaclav Havel.