A Monument to Forgetting

Meis talks about one disaster at Katyn that would help them to move past another. The forests around Smolensk became a killing ground of vast proportions. Other sites were chosen closer to Moscow and near a number of labor camps that made up Stalin's Gulag system. Outside of Smolensk, the killing was done in the Katyn forest. More than 4,400 Poles were shot and buried there in mass graves, many of them among the most important military and civilian leaders. It is estimated that he personally shot and killed seven thousand people, one by one, during the Katyn massacres. The Guinness Book of World Records, in fact, named him the world's "Most Prolific Executioner" in 2010.