The Bush That Still Burns

Jan Palach, Agnieszka Holland, and the Ethics of Witness

On 16 January 1969, a twenty-year-old philosophy student named Jan Palach walked into Wenceslas Square in Prague and set himself on fire. He died three days later. In his farewell letter, he called himself "Torch Number 1" — one of a group supposedly prepared to immolate themselves sequentially until the Czechoslovak nation woke from its resignation under Soviet occupation.

The torch metaphor was deliberate and desperate: a light that burns to illuminate, then goes out.

But in 2013, Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland made a different choice. Her acclaimed HBO mini-series about Palach's act and its aftermath is not called The Torch. It is called Burning Bush.

That seemingly small difference is the starting point of my recent research — and it opens onto surprisingly large questions about what it means to witness, to resist, and to respond to an ethical demand you cannot ignore.

Two Burning Bushes

In the book of Exodus, Moses encounters a bush that is on fire but not consumed. He turns aside to look. God speaks from the flames. The bush burns on, inexhaustible.

Palach's body, by contrast, was consumed entirely. He fell silent. And yet — like the biblical bush — he has not stopped speaking. Twenty years after his death, protesters in the same square invoked his name during the Velvet Revolution. His act continues to summon.

This paradox — the silence that keeps generating speech, the finite act that creates infinite demand — is what Holland's cinematic interpretation captures so precisely. Where Palach imagined himself as a torch, Holland reads him as a burning bush: not a light that flares and dies, but a revelation that persists.

What Makes a Sacrifice "Authentic"?

To understand why this distinction matters, it helps to know Jan Patočka — a Czech philosopher whose life and death are themselves part of this story. Patočka was a quiet intellectual who listened to Beethoven and kept largely to himself, until historical circumstances made silence impossible. In 1977, he became one of the founding signatories of Charter 77, the human rights manifesto that challenged communist rule. He died shortly afterwards from a stroke brought on by a ten-hour police interrogation.

Patočka's philosophy draws a careful distinction between what he calls "authentic sacrifice" and its counterfeits. Authentic sacrifice is not a heroic gesture in search of glory. It is not a rational transaction — trading a life for specific political gains. And it is not despair. Instead, it is a disclosure of truth: an act that shatters comfortable illusions and opens a space in which others are compelled to ask fundamental questions about how they are living.

Crucially, Patočka argues that authentic acts always exceed the actor's intentions. You cannot predict or control what they will set in motion. The act takes on a life of its own in the community's response — not unlike a burning bush that generates meaning beyond what any single observer can comprehend.

Palach planned to shock his nation into resistance. What he could not plan was his mother's fierce insistence that her son's death must have meaning, or a regime-sceptical lawyer named Dagmar Burešová finding herself drawn into a legal battle she knew she could not win by conventional measures — and fighting it anyway.

The Women Who Carried the Flame

Holland's most radical cinematic choice is also her most revealing one. In a story full of male actors — Palach himself, communist officials, student leaders — she builds her narrative around two women: Burešová, the lawyer, and Libuše Palachová, Palach's mother.

Neither woman wanted to be there. Burešová initially refuses the case. The mother is engulfed in grief. Both are pulled, reluctantly, into public witness by something they cannot turn away from. And it is this reluctance — this sense of being summoned rather than volunteering — that makes their response so powerful.

The French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, writing about the burning bush in Exodus, argues that Moses' encounter with the divine flame is the paradigm of all ethical relation. The bush does not threaten Moses; he could have walked past it. Instead, he turns aside to look — and in that turning, he finds himself no longer the observer but the one who is seen, called, addressed. His response, Hineni — "Here I am" — marks the moment when seeing becomes responsibility.

Burešová's journey in Holland's series follows exactly this structure. She hears about Palach's death, resists involvement, and gradually finds she cannot retreat. Her "Here I am" is not a heroic declaration. It is the recognition that she cannot, in conscience, walk past the burning bush.

Silence as a Form of Violence

What Holland also makes visible — and what drew me to this research — is the specific political context of Palach's protest. He was not only protesting the Soviet occupation. He was protesting the silence of his own people in the face of it.

This is a distinction that gets lost in accounts that treat Palach purely as a symbol of anti-communist resistance. He burned himself because people had stopped speaking, stopped pushing back, stopped insisting that what was happening was wrong. His act was a protest against resignation as much as oppression — against the slow accommodation to injustice that allows authoritarian systems to consolidate their hold.

In this sense, Palach's story is not only historical. We live in a moment when democratic backsliding is frequently accompanied by silence: the gradual normalization of what should remain unacceptable, the private reservations that never become public speech. The question Holland's series places before its viewer is the same one Palach placed before his generation: will you turn aside to see? And having seen, what will you do?

The Bush Still Burns

Patočka describes what he calls the "solidarity of the shaken" — a community that forms not around shared beliefs or common interests, but around the shared experience of having comfortable illusions stripped away. Those who have been shaken in this way recognize each other. They cannot go back to the way things were before.

Burning Bush is itself an act of that solidarity. Holland made the series in 2013, more than forty years after Palach's death, because she understood — from her own experience of the Prague Spring, her own arrest, her own exile — that the call does not expire. Each generation encounters the burning bush anew, and must decide whether to turn aside.

Palach thought he was a torch. Holland revealed that he was something more enduring: a flame that burns without consuming its source, a summons that persists beyond the moment that created it.

The bush still burns. The question it asks has not changed.