“To the burns unit on what was then Leger Street. The burns unit was on the corner of Žitná and Leger Street. They brought him there and took him away again in secret when he died, because there were crowds of people there; say, someone would see an old lady come up with an orchid and put the flower in one of those flag brackets - in his honour. So they took him away in complete secrecy, so that no one would find out, not that we wanted to hide him, but so that everything would take place with some kind of decency.”
“When you entered the room - it was the so-called shock room, they always put the severely burnt people there - and simply, when you entered, you felt as if you were in a crematorium. The air was full of the fragrance of the flowers that were lined up there, and this mixture of burns, which back then, as I said, were dressed quite haphazardly, you could say. Not that we didn’t want to, but it wasn’t possible. He was burnt all over, the only healthy patches on him were the soles of his feet. He was burnt all over. To various degrees - third, fourth, which is a fatal injury. [...] It doesn’t hurt, because the damage goes so deep, so he wasn’t in some extravagant kind of pain... But it’s all different nowadays. For example - because as I said, the burns, the surfaces, they fester, the pus pours out - so we didn’t have any levers, any lifting equipment back then, so we’d always roll up a clean, dry sheet under him, the other [nurse] would pull it out at the other side, that’d last a while, and then to repeat the whole process again... Nowadays it’s a completely different matter. But he knew that it was bad, that he wasn’t going to recover. There was no point telling him he’d walk again, as I used to tell the other ones...”
“He was glad when I told him it had been a success, because if he’d have burnt himself and there’d been no success, that would’ve been really, really sad. And it really was a success because back then all the radio stations discussed the matter. [...] The way I saw it was, kind of, that it was a pointless waste of a young life, but he wanted to prove something by it. He wanted to do it, so he did it. [...] I personally, as a mum, was against having my child burn to death. Some doctors don’t like it when they see someone hurting himself - others would like to live, but they’re not able to help them... It was a big thing, with a practically international impact, wasn’t it.”
Liana Hanusová, née Tučková, was born on 27 December 1937 in Varnsdorf; however, she grew up mostly in Prague. She learnt excellent German as a child in the border regions. In 1956 she graduated from a secondary medical school and started work at the burns unit of the Královské Vinohrady University Hospital in Prague, which was situated on Leger Street. In 1969 one of her patients was the student Jan Palach, who set fire to himself on 16 January 1969 in protest against the regime. She was not interested in politics, but she did not agree with the Communist regime. Her whole life she wanted to make use of her German in her profession, which she succeeded in doing as a pensioner at the age of fifty-eight, when she went to work as a nurse in Austria. She was married three times, she raised two daughters. She lives in Prague.
