The Prague City Council approved the placement of the Palach monument

Prague - A monument to commemorate the memory of student Jan Palach could be erected in the future near Jan Palach Square in Prague. The proposal was approved today by the cultural committee of the Prague city hall. Two nearly six-meter sculptures will cost up to eight million crowns. The placement of the monument will still be discussed by the city council and assembly. Twenty-year-old Palach self-immolated forty years ago in protest against the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops.
    The design of the sculptures comes from the workshop of architect John Hejduk. The architect dedicated it to Czechoslovakia already in 1991. For the Prague exhibition in the Royal Garden of Prague Castle in the 1990s, wooden replicas were created, which rotted away after fifteen years. "However, it never reached final processing," stated committee chairman Ondřej Pecha (ODS).
    The theme of the abstract work is a white and black figure - the son of the light-bringer and the suffering mother. According to the committee's proposal, the sculptures could be placed on Alšovo embankment. "We chose a green place on the edge of Palach Square and the embankment," Pecha said. The proposal is also supported by the heritage department of the city hall and the National Heritage Institute.
    A location for the monument has been sought for several years. According to earlier proposals, it was supposed to stand in front of the Prague Technical Library. However, Pecha stated that this was not a very dignified place. The plan to place it in the middle of Palach Square, whose reconstruction has been planned for several years, also did not come to fruition. "The sculptures are monumental; they are suited for a more intimate environment," added Pecha.
    Palach self-immolated on January 16, 1969, and succumbed to his injuries three days later. Since then, a so-called Palach Week begins every January. In honor of the brave student, several memorial plaques and monuments have already been unveiled in the past.

House of the Suicide and House of the Mother by John Hejduk sited at Prague Castle.

David Shapiro : The Funeral of Jan Palach
When I entered the first meditation,

   I escaped the gravity of the object.

I experienced the emptiness,

   And I have been dead a long time.

When I had a voice you could call a voice,

   My mother wept to me:

My son, my beloved son,

   I never thought this possible,

I'll follow you on foot.

   Halfway in mud and slush the microphones picked up.

It was raining on the houses;

   It was snowing on the police cars.

The astronauts were weeping,
   Going neither up nor out.

And my own mother was brave enough she looked

   And it was all right I was dead.

“House of the Suicide" and "House of the Mother of the Suicide" were inspired by a David Shapiro poem about Jan Palach, the Czech student who set himself on fire in January 1969 to protest the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia. Each "House" is a metal-clad cubic box of roughly 12 feet topped by 49 uniformly spaced metal "shards," of roughly the same height as the box bases. In the "House of the Suicide" the shards are slightly splayed apart, in the "House of the Mother of the Suicide" they huddle together, rising vertically from the cubic box. The monotone gray of the sealed House of the Suicide is punctuated only by a closed slit, painted red. The black House of the Mother of the Suicide can be entered. Inside one mounts a small platform, "a cross between a gallows and a widow's walk," from which one can look out at the House of the Suicide through a small slit in the elevation, painted blue on the exterior. In 1991 Czech President Vaclav Havel invited Hejduk, who was of Czech descent, to install the two houses temporarily at the Prague Castle.