In 1987 Theo Richmond, an English-born Jew, decided to take a short sabbatical to write a book. What started out as a six-month project would take seven years to complete, as the object of his curiosity took over his life.

Richmond's search was for a lost community, one that had vanished along with members of his family when the German army swept into Poland in 1939. Since his early childhood he had heard a word that stayed in his mind: Konin, the name of the Polish shtetl from which his parents had come. He set out to learn more about this small town and its Jewish community, to place on record something of what the Nazis had destroyed.

Drawing on archives as well as oral testimony, interweaving past and present, Theo Richmond re-creates in minute detail a world that is gone forever. Konin is a story of this vanished community and the people who once lived there.