Klonowski has also been critical of the motives of many of those working on exhumations of the mass graves . The initiative receives significant external funding , and when asked , Klonowski said , " God forbid that the excavations be completed . It ’d be the end of the high incomes , careers and trips to international conferences . The digging has to be done very gradually . It has got to last for years , until retirement . What about the mothers and widows ? Who cares ? Who ’s bothered about them ? Nobody cares that I care . It grieves me , even though it ’s not my country and they ’re not my people . . ” During her time in Bosnia , Dr Klonowski has identified more than two thousand family members , and has seen first hand the effect which having even part of a body identified as a loved one has on relatives of the victims . A woman named Mersada told the author of '' Like Eating A Stone '' that , “ Everyone in Bosnia knows Dr. Ewa . She digs up bones here and identifies people . She has found my son for me and has promised to find the other ” In '' Like Eating A Stone , '' Klonowski recounted the reactions of some family members which particularly stood out in her memory : " In one factory where we were examining bones , I heard a woman sobbing near a body bag . She was clutching her hands to her chest . Her sobbing and choking became uncontrollable and she was collapsing , so we called an ambulance . I noticed she was holding part of a shoe with thread hanging from it . She had recognized it as the shoe of her son which she had mended . The ambulance crew wanted to take it off her but I told them they would have to cut her hands off first.Another woman once sat quietly patting some bones . A tear slowly fell from her right eye . Her brother said it was time to go and she replied : ' Let me touch him just once more . ' I showed a skull to one woman who recognized the teeth of the dead husband . Her daughters were with her and crying . One of them asked me to take the skull back and close the body bag but the woman reached back in , took out some bones and started to kiss them . " Dr. Klonowski 's work is particularly valuable for the attention she pays to identifying the victims and reassembling remains . She is unique in this respect - Tochman writes , " In the places where Ewa does n’t go , no-one is particularly concerned whether a skull fits a spine . If five bodies are dug up , at most they have to be divided into five bags and buried in five coffins . If they were to assemble all the bones they dig up as painstakingly as Ewa does , there would be enough work for several anthropologists for a hundred years . ” Additionally , the results of her work have immense promise for future identification of the victims of other mass disasters . Authorities in Thailand , for example , are trying to learn from her experience in the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami
Indian Ocean Tsunami
2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami
Ewa Klonowski