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."
