For as long as he could remember, Theo Richmond knew of Konin. His parents had emigrated from the Polish town before World War I, and its name was mentioned fondly in the London home where Richmond grew up in the 1930s and '40s. But the young Jewish boy did not understand the tragedy that was befalling Konin. While he spent time at the local museum marveling at ancient Roman artifacts, Richmond writes,"my Konin relatives, some of them children of my own age, were being exterminated.'' Not until much later did he--or the world, for that matter--see the full dimensions of the Holocaust that consumed his ancestral home.

Richmond went on to become a successful documentary filmmaker, but Konin never left his mind. In 1987 he set aside his film work and began collecting information about the once bustling shtetl--Yiddish for a small country town. The desire to re-create the texture and color of its everyday existence became an obsession that took him to the U.S., Israel and finally Poland, searching in archives and tracing scattered Koniners. At every turn, Richmond, 66, discovered his own links to the past. Now, eight years after he began his historical and personal exploration, Konin: A Quest has been published in Britain, Australia and the U.S. and is being translated into Dutch and Italian.

At the start of the project, everything Richmond knew about Konin could have been inscribed on a postcard. In the end, 400 hours of recorded interviews, boxes of photos and stacks of research material spilled into every room of his London home. Of Konin's 12,100 citizens in 1939, some 2,700 were Jewish. Drawing a street map of the town, Richmond began locating places where they had worked and worshiped, studied and died, writing in names of families that had not lived there for more than 50 years. On the Warta River, 200 km west of Warsaw, Konin was bordered by meadows and orchards. It was the site of one of Poland's earliest Jewish settlements, and an almost medieval existence lingered into the 20th century; there were still no automobiles by 1939, and nobody had running water or indoor lavatories. There was a central town square, but life in the Jewish quarter centered on the Tepper Marik (literally, Pot Market), and on market days, writes Richmond, "you could hardly move for the crowd.'' Barrows and carts rattled over cobblestones, and people filled pails at the two water pumps in the center of the noisy square. Nearby were the handsome synagogue, the Jewish high school, the bes-medresh--a meeting place for prayer and study--and a library that in 1921 contained 5,225 books in Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish and Russian. Political societies, dramatic groups, lectures and balls created a rich social and cultural life.

As he tracked down elderly Koniners, some were reluctant to revive a painful past. "I haven't come to talk about the concentration camps,'' he told them. "I want to know about what life was like before the darkness fell.'' From faded remnants of memory, such faces and personalities emerged as Aryeh-Leib Witkowski, the burly milkman who donned white gloves and acted as an official wedding-guest greeter to help support his five children. "We were proud of our town,'' his daughter Lola Szafran, born in 1907, told Richmond in New York a year before she died of leukemia. She felt transported by thoughts of prewar Konin. "You know what it is like," she said, "when one has memories of a time when one was young and full of life.'' Her three brothers and their families perished in the Holocaust.

Like Szafran, most Koniners were elated to rediscover their youth, and Richmond heard elegiac reminiscences of swimming and fishing in the Warta and of listening on Sunday afternoons to the Russian military band in the park. There were harsh realities too of tyrannical teachers in the cheder, of being poor and, always, of scars left by anti-Semitism. On the streets, cheder boys dodged rocks thrown at them. A 1912 economic boycott had this slogan: "Don't buy from the Jews, only from your own.'' Remembered one man who had served in the Polish army: "We couldn't work in railways, in banks or the post office.''

But nothing prepared the Jews of Konin for the savagery of the Nazis. A public execution of a Jew and a Christian in September 1939 was a signal of what would follow. Within two months, 56 of the town's Polish elite--teachers, lawyers and influential leaders--were shot. Roundups of Jews began, and only a few escaped. Of the 2,700 in 1939, Richmond estimates, "perhaps 200 lived to see the defeat of their enemy.''

The Nazi occupiers destroyed all the Jewish religious books and records, and when Richmond visited the public town's library, which is housed in the renovated synagogue, he could not find a single written account of Konin's Jews. He sent the librarian a copy of Konin: A Quest, and it is now on the shelf. Several of the oldest and frailest Koniners he interviewed have since died, and to those who still survive, Richmond has proposed putting up a plaque somewhere in the town to honor the five centuries of Jews who lived there. No, they tell him, this book is the memorial.