The need for “forgiveness born from compassion, which alone can heal the wounds inflicted on Poland during the periods of Nazi and Soviet occupation during the Second World War”, was underlined by Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz in the homily he gave in the Sanctuary of Lagiewniki on 15 April, Sunday of Divine Mercy. The former private secretary of John Paul II acknowledged the need to seek the historical truth, but, he said, “forgiveness is superior to the search for the truth”, though in no way could forgiveness “be equated with forgetfulness”. “Without forgiveness, without real compassion, the painful wounds of the Polish people cannot be healed”, said the cardinal. He was speaking before the branch office in Katowice of the Institute of Historical Memory had sent an indictment against General Wojciech Jaruzelski and against eight other persons responsible for the introduction of martial law in Poland on 13 December 1981 to the Tribunal in Warsaw. The IPN has charged General Jaruzelski with having led a criminal organization of a military character. According to one of the better-known historians of the IPN, Jan Zaryn, the indictment “demonstrates that the impunity that has so far protected all those responsible for the introduction of martial law is about to end”. Another historian, Wojciech Roszkowski, judging remote the possibility of any intervention of the USSR in Poland in 1981, following the establishment of the free trade union Solidarnosc, has claimed that the order issued by Jaruzelski to place the armed forces and the police against the population was not justified by the safeguard of national security.
