On the night of August 20, 1968, Soviet-led Warsaw Pact forces invaded Czechoslovakia to put a stop to liberal reforms.
Less than three weeks later, Siwiec, 59, protested the move by dousing himself in paint thinner and setting himself ablaze during an official harvest festival in central Warsaw, where some 100,000 people had gathered.
'Hear my cry'
Before setting himself on fire on September 8, 1968—an idea he may have borrowed from monks protesting against the Vietnam War—he wrote his will and recorded an anti-communist manifesto which ended with the words: “Hear my cry, the cry … of a man who loved his own freedom and that of others more than anything else, more than his own life.”
A fierce opponent of the regime in Poland, Siwiec left his wife a letter in which he said: “Forgive me, it could not have been any other way.”
Siwiec died in hospital four days after later.
But his protest went largely unnoticed. The authorities said Siwiec was mentally ill and film footage of Siwiec in flames did not emerge until after the fall of communism.
He was posthumously awarded Czech, Slovak and Polish state distinctions.
'Not Only Siwiec'
Poland's Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) last week mounted an exhibition in the Czech capital Prague entitled Not Only Siwiec to showcase "Polish protests against the invasion of Warsaw Pact forces, including the People's Army of Poland, into Czechoslovakia in August 1968, as well as acts of solidarity with the Czechs and Slovaks, both within Czechoslovakia itself and outside of it."
IPN deputy head Karol Polejowski participated in the opening of the exhibition.
“As the title points out, not only Siwiec protested," Polejowski said at the event in Prague last Friday.
He added: "Unfortunately - for various reasons - the exhibition cannot present the figures of everyone who, in the gloomy times of the communist dictatorship, had the courage to protest or, what was equally dangerous, support the Czechs and Slovaks or even show their sympathy towards them. Similarly, it is impossible to portray all the forms these protests took on. Their scale was also quite surprising."
The same exhibition was later put on display in Warsaw.
In November last year, a mural was unveiled in Prague to commemorate Siwiec. Created by local artists, it is on a street named after the Polish anti-communist protester and next to a monument honouring him.
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Source: IAR, PAP, TVP Info, dzieje.pl