What does death by burning mean?

"What does it mean, death by burning? / A warning, a sign to the world. / My change did not have limits any more. / I felt sick with the whole world." That is the beginning of a poem that someone placed on the flame-blackened pavement in front of the medical high school in Plzen. On the night of Tuesday April 2, 21-year-old Roman Masl, a trainee teacher, burned himself to death there. He was the fifth person to do so within a month...

No one will ever find out what led Masl to a point from which he saw no option other than to pour petrol over himself, set light to it and die in horrible pain. In his farewell letter, parts of which were made public by the police, he wrote about his desperation about the current state of the world... These are the same feelings of disillusion that another student, 19-year-old Zdenek Adamec, referred to in his suicide note at the beginning of March...

According to psychologists, the much-publicised death of Adamec caused a domino effect which led to another four people ending their lives the same way. The simple, and undoubtedly simplified explanation, is that they subconsciously longed to be the centre of attention - something they probably lacked their whole lives...

Death by burning is the most drastic method of suicide. The pain is greatest at the beginning, before the flame burns the nerves. After that the burned skin does not hurt. Most of the victims die from suffocation because the blaze damages the respiratory tract, especially the lungs. Some people die immediately. Those who survive the beginning are worse off. Within days they start dying from suffocation as well: the lungs' alveoli fill with water and they stop breathing.

The number of cases of self-immolation in Europe over the past 50 years can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Mostly they involved people with severe mental illnesses. The only exception is the Czech Republic, which has had a sad tradition of self-immolation ever since it was used as a form of political protest by the philosophy student Jan Palach in January 1969. His act is frequently described as the most drastic suicide of the 20th century.

Palach burned himself five months after the Soviet army occupied Czechoslovakia. "In his case it was a rational decision that could not be explained by personal problems. Then it was a completely different time. Media was censored, live television broadcasting did not exist. There was no other way for people to draw attention to something. He wanted to shake people up, to wake them up from lethargy, and the method he chose guaranteed that everybody would learn about it," says Jaroslava Moserova, who, as a burns specialist, was the doctor who admitted Palach to hospital and had a chance to talk to him. "The current tragic cases do not serve any purpose: they are nonsensical, useless, and maybe a little cowardly. Now there are plenty of ways we can fight against what we don't like, and what we are not satisfied with."

Palach's death caused a domino effect... Another 26 people attempted to kill themselves in the same way in the four months after his death. Seven of them succeeded. All but two did so far completely personal reasons.

Palach lay dying in hospital for several days. He could talk, he could think, but he could not breathe. That is why one of his followers, Jan Zajic, chose a more sophisticated act to ensure he died instantly. He stripped naked and smeared his body with a flammable parquet polish. Then he drank a corrosive substance to stop himself screaming. Only then did he pour petrol over himself and set himself on fire.

From Tyden www.tyden.cz Czech Republic. Translated into English at Transitions Online www.tol.cz, April 15