The National Memorial is located across Brovarskyi Prospect from Bykivnia, next to the former Rybne Soviet fishery in the thick of the woods.

[5][6] From the early 1920s until the late 1940s throughout the Stalinist purges, the Soviet government hauled the bodies of tortured and killed political prisoners to the pine forests outside the village of Bykivnia and buried them in a grave that spanned 15,000 square metres (160,000 sq ft).

During the Soviet retreat in the early stages of Operation Barbarossa, Red Army troops levelled the village.

A document attesting to the origins of the Bykivnia victims was found by Polish émigré historians, researching the Nazi German archives after the war.

During the Soviet era the existence of the site was brought up to authorities numerous times with the most famous incident occurring in 1962 when the Ukrainian poet Vasyl Symonenko did so.

[2] A dog tag belonging to a Sergeant Józef Naglik, soldier of the Skalat Battalion of the Border Defence Corps, was found at the same spot.