The Union: Haunted By History's Horrors

For almost 50 years there were whispered stories about black vans that drove every night into a fenced enclosure in the Kurapaty forest, about gunshots and screams waking villagers who lived nearby. But not until last spring did the full horror begin to be known. Workers digging a trench for a gas pipeline through the forest near Minsk came across a heap of human skulls pierced by bullets from Nagant revolvers fired at close range. The prosecutor of the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic set up a commission to investigate the murders. Last July more skulls and bones were unearthed, along with...