The Polish parliament on Friday honoured Polish accountant Ryszard Siwiec,
who set himself on fire in 1968 in protest of the Warsaw Pact invasion of
Czechoslovakia in the summer of that year. Addressing the lower house of
parliament, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk praised the deed as a
defining sacrifice of the generation and the parliamentary distinction as
a
testament to the importance of Polish-Czech-Slovak relations.
Siwiec, a former Home Army officer and father of five, set himself alight
during a harvest festival on September 8, 1968, in front of roughly
100,000
onlookers. Several similar self-immolation protests would follow,
including
that of Jan Palach.