found in the impressive modern history of Poland, a country that has learned to live
intimately with tragedy and that disappeared from the mappa mundi in 1795 and
appeared again in the same as of 1918. During those 123 years, Poland, amid
successive wars, partitions, persecutions, and repressions, and acts of violence,
survived in the culture, the literature, the religion, in synthesis, in the spirit of their
suffered people.99
130. In short, neither in the individual or social realm can we neglect our
memory,100 which, in our days, emerges stronger than before because of the
awakening of human conscience for the vital need to remember and venerate the
victims of human cruelty. The memorial “The Eye That Cries”, is one of the symbols of
the tragedy lived by the Peruvian people during the last two decades of the XX
century, which generated deep wounds that have not yet healed. We cannot avoid
that “The Eye That Cries” continue crying, since each human being and each social
means must learn to live with their own area of guilt.
XI.
The Right to a Fair Trial (National and International) as a Right
to the Realization of Justice, and as an Imperative of the Jus Cogens.
Cambridge, University Press, 2005 [reprint], pp. 173-187; Y. Ternon, Guerres et
génocides au XXe. siècle, Paris, O. Jacob, 2007, pp. 126-170; J.-B. Racine, Le
génocide des arméniens - Origine et permanence du crime contre l'humanité, Paris,
Dalloz, 2006, pp. 1-160; A. Toynbee and J. Bryce, Atrocidades Turcas na Armênia
[1916], São Paulo/Rio de Janeiro, Ed. Paz e Terra, 2003 [reed.], pp. 11-118.
.
As described, almost literally by a scholar of its history: - "(...) The essential
sources of its history have to be sought less in social, political, and economic affairs
than in the realm of culture, literature, and religion - in short, in the world of the
Polish spirit, which enabled men and women to live their lives in their own way in
spite of the established order, and often in defiance of the law." Thus the importance
offered, v.g., to the folklore and historical traditions. In Poland, "throughout these five
generations, Polish history loses much of its material substance, and retreats into the
realm of ideas, plans, dreams, and prospects. Right from the start, the subject seems
tailored for the romantics, with their contempt for material things and their
preoccupation with the world of the spirit. Polish literature is a surer guide to the
essential features of the age than is sociology or economics. Owing to the specific
features of the partitions, the link between politics and literature in Poland was
exceptionally intimate. (...) In Poland, (...) national politics and national literature
were smelted in the same fierce fire, and were fused into an amalgam of such unusual
intensity that often one could no longer be recognized from the other. In a land where
all forms of open political activity of a national character were gradually suppressed,
poetry and fiction were mobilized as the most convenient vehicle of political
expression. (...) In Poland, literature did not merely reflect politics as it did elsewhere;
it threatened to replace it. (...) Under such pressures, and hardened by the horrors of
XXth-century occupations, they [the Poles] developed a sense of social solidarity
which the comfortable inhabitants of modern democracies (...) find hard to
comprehend". N. Davies, Heart of Europe - The Past in Poland's Present, Oxford,
University Press, 2001 [reed.], pp. 139, 154, 156 y 161, and cf. p. 148.
99
.
We have already correctly stated that "là où la mémoire est dynamique, là où
elle sert d'instrument à une transmission psychologique et commune, l'héritage se
transforme en présent"; G. Steiner, Le silence des libres, Paris, Éd. Arléa, 2007, p. 14.
100