Every culture wants to memorialize its dead. Every family needs the missing to be identified to reach closure. Perhaps that is why a wartime mass grave offends something so deep in the human conscience. Little can be said with certainty about the hundreds of bodies discovered last week at Izium, in a pine forest in northeastern Ukraine, other than that they are the beginning of a long story.
Restoring human dignity to the most dehumanising of scenes; heaped anonymous corpses, the reduction of lives to nothing, and the stench of abandonment is a painstaking forensic endeavour.