If you take the train out of Vilnius for one stop you'll find yourself at a small railroad town called Paneriai. It's a pretty miserable spot; crumbling apartments, tin roofs, angry dogs, and peeling paint. There's one paved road in the town, and it runs from the depot to a small parking lot in the woods.

Follow the trail from the parking lot through the tightly grown pines and you come across a stone monument, then another, then a third. A bouquet of white flowers are placed atop one of them. There's a lot of Russian writing, some Lithuanian, sprinklings of Hebrew.

Something terrible happened here.

A placard on the wall of a small building reads, in part, "... look at the sand that turned grey. Even now, after many years it seems as if it were parched from human blood and ash of the remains. Such is the former kingdom of death..."

It's a peaceful and quiet place now. On a cold, late afternoon, I had the lonely woods to myself. I could hear the echoes of trains passing not so far away, and the barking of dogs. Of the 100,000 human beings who lost their lives in this stand of trees, there was no trace.