From the Back Cover:
In 1939 a community of three thousand vanished into history. Twenty-five years later one man set out to find them. Konin is the story of his obsessive search for a vanished world.
'It is a great book, beautifully written, compelling from beginning to end, and animated by a quiet passion that forgetting should not be allowed its victory ... Theo Richmond has rescued a small shtetl town from oblivion: everything is restored with pungent life, the slithering fish in the market, the pickles in the barrels, sounds of Passover, the thwack of the teacher's stick. A place and a people destroyed by horror have found a great remembrancer' Michael Ignatieff
'In its combination of personal and historical drama, it is unique, engrossing and triumphant' Thomas Keneally, author of Schindler's List
'Unforgettable ...With the combined and highly developed skills of historian, biographer, interviewer, anthropologists and lover of the object of his quest, his sensitively revealed every possible layer of the life and the knowable times of Konin ... Richmond's mesmerising account has made us feel like inhabitants'Hugo Gryn, Sunday Times
Synopsis:
A blend of personal memoir, oral history and biography, a story of lives caught up in the sweep of history, the resulting book encompasses the Holocaust in an illuminating way. Richmond's search was for a lost community, one that had vanished along with members of his family. Since his early childhood in London, he had heard his relatives mention a place called Konin, the Polish town from which both his parents came. He felt an irresistible urge to find out more about this small town and its Jewish community, to place on record something of what the Nazis had destroyed and thus to remember. Everywhere he hunted for elusive clues that might lead him to this lost world. He searched for its few survivors, scattered in many lands. Starting with one old man in London, he traced others, not only in Britain, but in Brooklyn, Florida, Texas, Minnesota, Nebraska, on a kibbutz in Israel, in Tel-Aviv, Jerusalem and elsewhere.
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