There, he instigated a strike action with other Czech students, the result of which got their working hours reduced from 10 to 8 per day and catering was improved.

[3] Palach's self-immolation was the third act of that kind after those of Ryszard Siwiec in Poland and Vasyl Makukh in Ukraine, which were successfully suppressed by the authorities and went mostly forgotten until the Revolutions of 1989.

[4][5][6] According to a letter he sent to several public figures, an entire clandestine resistance organization had been established with the purpose of practising self-immolation until their demands were met; however, it seems that such a group never existed.

[7] The demands declared in the letter were the abolition of censorship and a halt to the distribution of Zprávy, the official newspaper of the Soviet occupying forces.

People in other Warsaw Pact countries emulated his example such as Hungarians Sándor Bauer on 20 January 1969 and Márton Moyses on 13 February 1970.

As his gravesite was becoming a national shrine, the StB (Czechoslovak secret police) set out to destroy any memory of Palach's deed and exhumed his remains during the night of 25 October 1973.

In their 1983 song "Nuuj Helde" the Janse Bagge Bend (from the Netherlands) asks whether people know why Jan Palach burned.

Norwegian songwriter and singer Åge Aleksandersen mentioned Palach's name in his 1984 song "Va det du Jesus".

Norwegian songwriter Hans Rotmo mentioned Palach's name among other notable political activists such as Victor Jara and Steve Biko in his 1989 song "Lennon Street".

American metal band Lamb of God wrote a song on their studio album VII: Sturm und Drang, entitled "Torches", that was inspired by Palach's actions.

The Italian far-right folk group "La Compagnia dell'Anello" released a song dedicated to him, titled "Jan Palach".

It includes a setting of words which appeared briefly on a statue in Wenceslas Square after the event, before being erased by the authorities: "Do not be indifferent to the day when the light of the future was carried forward by a burning body".

[citation needed] Jan Palach is named in context in the 1992 poem by Axel Reitel, "Ústí nad Labem" in the book Das exil und der Sandberg Gedichte 1976–1990 published by Boesche-Verlag Berlin und Haifa, referring a school-holiday near Lake Mácha and entertained about this self-immolation against dictatorship.

[21] Pakistani poet Qazi Zafar Iqbal paid tribute to Jan Palach in the form of a poem in Urdu.

A sequence of poems exploring the implications of Palach's death called One Match by the poet Sheila Hamilton were published in issue 51 of the Dorset-based poetry serial, Tears in the Fence (ed.

Czech poet Miroslav Holub wrote a poem entitled the "Prague of Jan Palach" (1969) in memory of the martyr.

[23] The three-part 2013 Czech-Polish television show Burning Bush, directed by Agnieszka Holland, is situated around the events that happened after Jan Palach's self-immolation.