For decades the place was a forest with a secret. After German exhumation in 1943 confirmed the bodies were Polish and the killings Soviet, the Soviets reburied the evidence and forbade access. Polish families could not grieve at gravesites their state insisted did not exist. In London, the Polish government-in-exile awarded a Katyn memorial the Virtuti Militari, Poland's highest military honor, in 1976—an honor given when nothing else could be given. Polish writers in the diaspora kept the story alive in books that were smuggled, copied, and passed hand to hand. Inside Poland, mentioning Katyn correctly could end careers and visit the secret police on a family. The truth lived in private kitchens and sealed church homilies, waiting.

Mikhail Gorbachev's April 1990 acknowledgment opened the forest. Polish forensic teams returned to Katyn, joined by Russian counterparts, and the work of identification began in earnest. A 1994 bilateral treaty on war cemeteries and memorials gave Poland the legal foundation to build a proper burial ground. Construction began at Katyn and at three other massacre sites: Mednoye in Russia's Tver Oblast, Piatykhatky near Kharkiv in Ukraine, and the Russian section at Smolensk. All four cemeteries opened in 2000, a coordinated act of remembrance for what Stalin had ordered scattered across the western Soviet Union. The Virtuti Militari awarded to the London memorial was carried back to Katyn and laid here.

The opening ceremony on a July day in 2000 brought the Polish Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek and his Russian counterpart Viktor Khristenko to walk together along the main alley. The Catholic mass was celebrated by Józef Glemp, the primate of Poland; the Orthodox liturgy was led by Cyril Gundyaev, then Metropolitan of Smolensk and later Patriarch of Moscow. Protestant, Muslim, and Jewish prayers were also offered. The dead included Polish officers of every faith Poland held, and the cemetery refused to honor only some of them. The Russian section of the same memorial complex contains roughly 6,500 victims of Stalin's Great Purge of the 1930s—an acknowledgment, beside the Polish graves, that the same hand had killed many of its own people in the same forest.

On April 10, 2010, the Polish President Lech Kaczyński, his wife Maria, and ninety-four other Polish officials—senior military commanders, members of parliament, central bank president, deputy foreign ministers—were flying to Katyn for the seventieth anniversary of the massacre. Their Tu-154 went down about half a mile short of the runway at Smolensk in heavy fog. There were no survivors. A delegation traveling to honor the dead became dead itself. Poland's grief at Katyn now contains two losses, separated by seven decades and bound to the same place. The 2010 crash, and the political controversies that followed it about its causes, has shadowed Polish-Russian relations ever since.

Walk the main alley today. The mass graves are marked with iron slabs flush with the ground, like dark scars in the pine carpet. At the alley's end stands an altar with a memorial bell housed underground, struck on commemoration days so its sound rises through the earth. The forest is quiet. The wind moves through pine needles the way it moved through them in April 1940 when the trucks arrived from the Kozelsk camp and the killing began. The cemetery does not let you forget that this is not a memorial in some symbolic place. It is a memorial where it happened.