At Kuropaty the executions continued for four and a half years, as pit after pit was dug and filled with bodies. Just as in the Ukraine, around the execution grounds, the NKVD had built a fence ten feet high. This time the local villagers heard the pleas of the victims echoing across the night air. Even in the final stages of the Terror, when the Nazis were bombing Minsk in July 1941, the executions continued, and by the outbreak of World War II, a quarter of a million people lay buried in one of eight killing fields located around Minsk.34
