Theo Richmond, a British documentary filmmaker who depended on words rather than images to create what he called “the most worthwhile thing I’ve ever done” — an acclaimed book, Konin: A Quest, that captured the quotidian life and precipitous death of the Jewish population of his parents’ hometown in Poland after the Nazi invasion — died on August 25 in London. He was 93.

Over the course of seven years, Mr. Richmond conducted some 400 interviews in Poland, Israel, Florida, Nebraska, Texas, Montreal and Brooklyn, racing against time to collect memories from former residents of Konin, a village 140 miles west of Warsaw, near the German border.

In 1939, about 3,000 of its 13,000 residents were Jewish. By 1940, according to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, “the town was Judenrein,” or “cleansed” of Jews.

“This book is about my return journey to a place I had never been to,” Mr. Richmond wrote, “a place of which I knew nothing except that it was a part of my past and in a curiously powerful way a part of my present.”