What does a contemporaneous or primary source say about Jan Patočka's March 1977 death and StB interrogation?
Two claim-notes — claim-patocka-1977-death-after-stb-interrogation (death date 13 March 1977, age 69) and claim-havel-account-last-time-saw-patocka-alive (Havel's own account of the interrogation-room separation) — currently rest on a single source: Radio Prague International's 2007 retrospective, itself a thirty-years-later retelling of a Czech Television interview, not a transcript read directly. The death date and age are quantitative claims that need a Tier 1-2 primary per the sourcing floor; Havel's account is a surprising, load-bearing biographical claim that the same floor escalates past Tier 3 when it can be.
What's needed: a contemporaneous (March 1977) or primary document confirming the date, age, cause of death, and ideally corroborating or directly quoting Havel's account of the interrogation-room separation.
Candidate next moves, both already surfaced and unresolved as of the 2026-08-25 capture that raised this:
- The Washington Post's 15 March 1977 report ("Risks in Dissidents'
Quest") — a same-week, non-retrospective source.
archive_pagetimed out on this twice at capture time; worth a retry, or a Wayback Machine check for a cached copy. - A 2017 book edition of StB documents on Patočka, reportedly released for Charter 77's 40th anniversary — a genuine primary-document candidate, named in search results but not opened or independently verified to exist as described.
- A direct transcript or recording of Havel's Czech Television interview
(network and air date not yet identified) would resolve the
[unverified-quote]flag on the second claim-note independently of the death-date question.