BOOK REVIEW / NONFICTION : Journeying to a Past of Horror--and Occasional Magic : KONIN: A Quest <i> by Theo Richmond</i> ; Pantheon; $27.50, 568 pages

Theo Richmond describes “Konin” as a book about “my return journey to a place I had never been,” which suggests the magic that we find in its pages. We never quite forget that the characters in his tale are the ghosts of men and women who were cruelly tortured and murdered during the Holocaust--and yet he brings them fully and vividly alive as if in a fairy tale.

Konin is an unremarkable little Polish town near the German border. More than two-thirds of its Jewish population of some 3,000 souls were killed during the Holocaust. Among the survivors were Richmond’s parents, who raised him in England but did not allow him to forget the shtetl where their loved ones had been martyred.

Driven by his own curiosity in middle age--and inspired to create a memorial to the shtetl and the people who once lived there--Richmond set out on a quest into history. He took a “crash course” in Yiddish; he pored over maps, photographs, letters and books; above all, he sought out the survivors of Konin in their new homes: Omaha, Brooklyn, a suburb of London, kibbutzim in Israel.

As the author encounters these witnesses to the destruction of the Jewish community of Konin, their memories begin to work a powerful spell. Suddenly, we see (and hear and smell) the shtetl in the days before the 20th Century overtook it, a series of quaint and colorful scenes that remind us of the stories of Sholem Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Not every memory of life in the shtetl is rhapsodic. One survivor named Mark recalls that his teacher in the religious school called a cheder was equipped with an ivory pointer and a leather whip; if the pointer was not sufficient, the teacher resorted to the whip, as he did when the audacious young boy dared to ask who created God.

“He was a sadist,” says Mark with unwitting irony. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Konin” adds to the catalog of horror and inhumanity that is the history of the Holocaust, and we are not spared the worst excesses that were visited upon the Jewish men, women and children of Konin. And yet, even when Richmond describes how the claws of the Holocaust begin to close around Konin, he manages to find a glimmer of magic in the darkest moments.

For example, Konin was spared from German bombers during the invasion of Poland, the author writes, because of the abundance of ducks around the shtetl.

“Disturbed by the noise of the planes, a flock of ducks rose into the sky, sparks of sunlight flashing off their wet bodies and wings,” he writes. “The German pilots, thinking they were coming under heavy antiaircraft fire, dropped most of their bombs on the meadows near the town.”

And when the Germans burned the scrolls of the Torah from the looted synagogues of Konin--a bonfire that lasted three days, as one survivor remembers it--some divine spark seemed to manifest itself: “The colors of the flames from the parchment were unbelievable--every color of the rainbow.”

By 1942, Richmond reports, “German bureaucrats were able to produce a statistical report with a satisfying zero: not one Jew was left in Konin.” But the author himself can be credited with a belated victory against the Nazi genocide. He has not only found the survivors and honored the courage and vision and good fortune that allowed them to survive; he has also honored the victims who did not survive.

Indeed, Richmond recognizes that the real function of his book is to rescue a few pitiable victims of the Holocaust from the anonymity of the mass graves to which they were condemned by the Nazis. By asking--and answering--his own questions about who these men and women really were and how they really lived (“I wanted to get to know the people as individuals whom I would recognize if I met them in the street”), Richmond restores them to life.

“Forgetting is not exile,” writes Richmond, recasting an old Hasidic saying that captures the luminous spirit of the whole enterprise that culminated in “Konin.” “Forgetting is the Final Solution.”