Ryszard Siwiec

Memorial stone in front of the PGE Narodowy in Warsaw

Ryszard Siwiec (born March 7, 1909 in Dębica , † September 12, 1968 in Warsaw ) was a Polish philosopher , accountant and former soldier in the Polish Home Army . During the harvest festival in Warsaw on September 8, 1968 Stadium Dziesieciolecia , on the next 100,000 spectators in the stands and leading party cadres of the PZPR were present and diplomats from abroad, committed Siwiec a self-immolation to protest against the invasion of the Warsaw Pact into Czechoslovakia in August that year and to protest the socialist regime in Poland.

Life

Born in Dębica in south-east Poland , Ryszard Siwiec studied philosophy at the university in Lemberg, then still in Poland, and then became a teacher. During the Second World War he fought as an underground soldier in the Polish Home Army (Polish: Armia Krajowa ) against the German occupiers. After the war he decided to give up the teaching profession in order not to support the indoctrination of the youth by the communist regime that emerged in Poland after the war. Instead, he worked as an accountant in Przemyśl until his death and had five children with his wife.

Many years before his self-immolation , Siwiec had already begun to spread his critical thoughts on the ruling regime of the Polish United Workers' Party (Polish: PZPR ) on handouts . For his own protection, he signed his texts with the pseudonym Jan Polak . The invasion of the Polish military along with other armies of the member states of the Warsaw Pact into Czechoslovakia in August 1968 touched Siwiec strong and caused him active action against the regime. The self-immolation as a form of protest, to make the public aware of the abuses that Siwiec chose presumably based on the Vietnamese monk Thich Quang Đức , who five years ago in Saigon in protest against the oppression of Buddhists in Vietnam by the government President Ngô Đình Diệm himself set fire to it.

Photo of self-immolation

procedure

Siwiec had chosen the 1968 harvest festival as the place of self-immolation, which was to be held in the Dziesięciolecia stadium, which could hold 100,000 people. Before leaving for Warsaw by train, Siwiec wrote his will and at the same time recorded an anti-communist message with a tape recorder. He said goodbye to his wife via a letter he had written on the train ride and sent to himself by post in Warsaw. In it he asked for forgiveness and explained the necessity of his action. He also wrote that he felt very comfortable and felt an inner calm like never before in his life. However, the letter only reached his wife after 22 years. The Polish State Security Service intercepted the letter and withheld it.

In the stadium, Siwiec took a seat in the middle of one of the stands. He had previously distributed flyers with anti-communist texts in the stadium. When he set himself on fire with a lighter, he shouted at the same time: "I protest." He stopped people and firefighters who tried to put out the fire. He was taken to a nearby hospital and died of burns four days after the incident.

consequences

To this day it is unclear why Siwiec had waited until the dance performances of various youth groups before doing his act and had not already started during the several-minute speech by party chairman Władysław Gomułka . Of the 100,000 spectators present in the stands and the dance groups on the field, not all of them had noticed the action. Also due to the current program, the music and the text of the stadium and radio speakers, there was no interruption that would have drawn the attention of the rest of those present.

The nearby witnesses in the stadium and the firefighters who wanted to save him were persuaded after Siwiec's death that he was mentally ill. There was not a single word reported about the crime in any of the fully state-owned media. During his funeral, which attracted a large number of people, the State Security Service tried to spread rumors about Siwiec's alleged alcoholism.

It was not until April 1969 that the Polish-language series of Radio Free Europe reported about the incident and the background. It is therefore uncertain whether the Czechoslovak student Jan Palach knew of the events in Warsaw when he burned himself to death in Prague on January 16, 1969, also in protest. Siwiec's deed only became better known in 1981, when his family had published a publication on the subject and, in the course of political events, criticism of the ruling regime grew.

Two years after the political change, in 1991 the Polish director Maciej Drygas dedicated his award-winning film Hear my scream (Polish: Usłyszcie mój krzyk ) to the deed of Ryszard Siwiec, in which he also lets contemporary witnesses and relatives have their say. It mainly used recordings that had previously been withheld by the State Security Service. It was not until the film was broadcast that Siwiec and his act became known throughout Poland.

In his honor, a bridge in Przemyśl was named after Ryszard Siwiec. There are also several streets with his name in Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia . There was also some debate about whether the new Narodowy stadium in Warsaw should be named after him.

Siwiec received the Czech Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk Order posthumously in 2001 , the Polish Polonia Restituta Order in 2003 and the Slovak White Double Cross Order in 2006 . A street in Prague where the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes is located was named after him, and in 2010 a memorial was erected for him in the street in front of the institute building.

On March 6, 2009, the Polish Sejm issued a resolution to commemorate the deed and express the greatest appreciation for Siwiec.

Web links

Commons : Ryszard Siwiec  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Declaration by the spokesman for the institute, Jiří Reichl, online at: www.ustrcr.cz/cs/zverejneni-… ( Memento of the original from January 11, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Czech, accessed September 24, 2010 
2. ^ Message from the iDNES.cz server dated August 10, 2010, online at: zpravy.idnes.cz , in Czech, accessed on September 24, 2010
3. ↑ Monitor Polski, No. 14, Poz. 171, March 6, 2009.