AllMovie

This historical drama brings up the issue of how much time has to go by before the tragedies rising out of political conflicts are finally reported honestly and exposed for what they really were. A writer who fought in the Polish resistance movement has died and was never able to publish the truth about a massacre he witnessed during his lifetime. His diary, however, has the whole truth and it is given to a friend by the writer's widow. The friend realizes that the novel he weaves out of the threads provided by the diary will make him a towering literary figure in Poland, simply because the diary is so powerful itself. The only way to convey the story in the diary would be to write a fictionalized account that would make the truth clear to everyone without having to be too specific. As the friend interviews people who were alive at the time of the massacre, he comes to realize that any faithful account of the diary's contents is going to sensationally affect the perpetrators of the crime -- never even suspected until now. In the end, the friend must decide whether to sit down to write the story or not.