Klonowski explained to BBC that her interest in identifying the dead goes back to the exhumation of her grandfather from the Katyn Forest massacre in Poland , 1940 . He was in the Polish Army reserve in 1939 and was sent to the east , where he was captured and later shot by the Russians . He was uncovered in the first exhumation . That event , she said , was what gave her the belief that relatives should have remains over which to mourn . " It is absolutely important and the same all over the world . When someone you love dies , you bury them or perhaps scatter the ashes ( ... ) Our human reaction is to have a place to go and sit or pray or put a candle or a flower . It is exactly the same whatever religion . " When the Bosnian war broke out in 1992 , she was " ... horrified . It was part of Europe . You saw the horse carts , the people on tractors , the burned houses . I felt I was totally useless as a human being . So when the war ended and there was talk of exhumation , this was something I could do . " Klonowski 's project , to attempt to exhume and identify all of the victims of the Bosnian war " was not an easy one to start nor has it been straightforward to carry out . " The complexity of the job goes far beyond what the simplicity of the phrase " DNA " might suggest
Katyn Forest massacre
Katyn massacre
Ewa Klonowski