The bone collector

In Bosnia, where insanity consumed humanity, she drew still more anonymous corpses from the loose soil. In the killing fields of Croatia, the bodies came out of the ground in layers. In a morgue of Serbia, she opened the refrigerator boxes one by one to count the toll of tyranny.

She studied the bones. She listened to the bones, piles of bones that grew into mountains of bones. Now she talks for them. ‘‘I aspired to give a voice to people silenced by their own governments or militaries, people suppressed in the most final way, murdered and put into clandestine graves,’’ Koff writes in her just-published memoir of her five years as ‘The Bone Woman’.

To say that Clea Koff is a forensic anthropologist doesn’t begin to convey the nature of her field work or the idealistic fervour that she brought to it. On and off from 1996 through 2000, she served with United Nations scientific teams that uncovered, catalogued and identified the evidence of the worst crimes of this age. But that doesn’t convey enough either. Far from it. To really understand, you must follow her into the grave, trowel in hand, as she calls out: ‘‘right knee’’ or ‘‘left knee’’.

That is the 271-page story she has written. Page 34: ‘‘Many people have asked me how I could smile so much in the midst of a mass grave or a field of scattered bones. It is because I see not just death—about which I can do nothing—but bones and teeth and hair, which I can do something about, something that serves the deceased and possibly a greater community.’’

Page 8: ‘‘In addition to helping authorities determine the identity of deceased people, forensic anthropology has a role in human rights investigations, because a dead body can incriminate perpetrators who believe they have silenced their victims forever. That is the part of forensic anthropology that drives me.’’

The Bone Woman is a vividly or, if one prefers, a frightfully descriptive account of the sights, sounds, smells and what it feels like. In one passage, she recalls her nightmares: a trowel scraping through saponified flesh as she lay against dismembered legs. Her descriptions are beyond what can be related in a family newspaper.

Koff first went to Rwanda as a 23-year-old optimist. If mass murderers can be confronted with evidence of their evil and brought to justice, she reasoned, then perhaps mass murder…well, one can hope. In this vein, some book reviewers and her publisher have found The Bone Woman to be an unexpectedly hopeful work.

But Koff, relying on her journals, recounts her coming-of-age in the graveyards. As her experience grows, so do her doubts. By the end of her book, she is no longer sanguine about the end of mass killings. Her hope for humanity is not forgone, but recalibrated. At the least, she notes, her work to expose mass graves will silence those who might otherwise retreat into denial.

But she won’t be going back to the UN missions. ‘‘My mother said I was being hollowed out,’’ she begins. She searches for other words, but they do not come.

— (LAT-WP)