Ryszard Siwiec (; 7 March 1909 – 12 September 1968) was a Polish accountant and former Home Army resistance member who was the first person to commit suicide by self-immolation in protest against the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. Although his act was captured by a motion picture camera, Polish press omitted any mention of the incident, which was successfully suppressed by the authorities. Siwiec prepared his plan alone, and few people realized what he tried to achieve with his sacrifice. His story remained mostly forgotten until the fall of communism, when it was first recounted in a documentary film by Polish director Maciej Drygas. Since then, Siwiec has been posthumously awarded a number of Czech, Slovak, and Polish honors and decorations. Siwiec's death foreshadowed the much better known self-immolation of Jan Palach in Prague four months later. Siwiec was the first person from Central and Eastern Europe to self-immolate in protest of the invasion. Biography Siwiec was born in Dębica on 7 March 1909, under the Austrian Partition of Poland, then part of Austria-Hungary. He graduated from the Lwów University with a degree in philosophy. Siwiec worked as an accountant since the 1930s in Przemyśl, where he moved shortly after graduation. During World War II he escaped forced labour for the Germans by taking employment as a gardener and joined the Armia Krajowa (Home Army), the Polish resistance movement. Ryszard Siwiec married in 1945 and had five children. Self-immolation According to friends and family, he had extensive historical knowledge and was deeply disillusioned with the reality of communist Poland. He supported the protesting students during the March 1968 Polish political crisis in Poland, printing bibuła leaflets and asking his daughter to distribute them. According to health professionals, he was of sound mind, and fully rational, at the time of his suicide. Siwiec planned his self-immolation months in advance, writing out a last will in April, and leaving written and tape-recorded statements explaining his revulsion at both the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia and the Polish People's Republic's participation in it. Siwiec obtained passes to a national harvest festival taking place on 8 September 1968 at the 10th-Anniversary Stadium in Warsaw. His goal was to have his act be witnessed by nearly 100,000 spectators, including numerous journalists and the national leadership of the Polish United Workers' Party. He set himself ablaze during one of the festival dances using a flammable