It’s a continent away, but the backwater village of Ivenets in Belarus has long haunted Florette Lynn. Lynn’s maternal grandparents lived there until the early 1940s, when they vanished in the Holocaust.

Growing up in the Bronx, N.Y., Lynn knew little about her Eastern European roots. Her mother, the family’s lone survivor, rarely spoke about life in the old country, except to disparage it.

But about eight years ago, Lynn, of Westwood, N.J., set out on a mission to recover the past — a quest that is just now reaching fruition.

“At a certain point in my life I realized I knew nothing about my heritage,” said Lynn, 70. “Except for a couple of photographs, it was just this big empty space.”

The retired Hawthorne school librarian eventually flew to Belarus to see the town for herself.

And it was there, while walking the streets of the old shtetl, that her journey took an unexpected turn. She experienced an awakening in which she saw flashes of humanity and kindness in a place she had always associated with tremendous evil.

The Jews of Ivenets were wiped out by the Nazis, usually shot but occasionally whipped to death with barbed wire, according to accounts by survivors that Lynn painstakingly translated from Yiddish.

But Lynn and her husband forged a handful of friendships with residents, including a 79-year-old Christian woman who had helped hide Jews during the war.

Lynn solemnly surveyed the places where Jews died, yet she also reveled in seeing the places that they loved — such as a factory that still makes tiny ceramic animals and an ancient cemetery where they walked in reverence on the holiday of Tisha B’Av.

She left without learning anything new about her grandparents but said she felt as though her family’s connection to the town had been restored — 65 years after it was violently severed.

“I was fed in so many ways — spiritually, physically and emotionally,” Lynn said. “No, I didn’t find anything about my grandparents, but I feel I recovered something of their past.”

Lynn returned from Ivenets a year ago. But her effort to tell the town’s story is just picking up. She has finished translating a book of survivor accounts and plans to self-publish it later this month. She is also visiting synagogues and Jewish centers to discuss her experience.

Later this month she will go back to Ivenets — this time with her two grown daughters and their families.

“I have to show it to them,” Lynn said. “I want to give them indelible memories and give them a sense of history and to let them proclaim that Hitler didn’t finish the job. We’re here.”

She’s far from alone. Holocaust researchers say Jewish genealogy is booming — especially since the release of archives from the former Soviet Union, the rise of the Internet and an explosion in Holocaust resource centers and museums.

“The possibilities have increased dramatically,” said David Marwell, director of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan, where nearly 1,000 people log on to the museum’s genealogy site daily.

Lynn began her quest in 1998, initially making contacts and doing research on the Internet. But she became riveted after obtaining a copy of the Ivenets memorial book — a mostly Yiddish-language collection of first-person accounts that was self-published decades ago by survivors.

The book chronicles mass murder in the plainspoken voices of small-town shopkeepers and peddlers.

One resident told of the Nazis escorting their first victims — 35 men — into the forest, telling them that they were going to work. Then she heard the gunfire.

“The remaining Jews were brought into the woods to take the murdered ones and throw them into the toilet pits of the barracks,” she wrote.

Lynn translated the entire 484-page volume, making the accounts available in English for the first time.

“I felt that somehow God wanted me to do this,” she said.

Ivenets, which is about 30 miles from Minsk, was captured in June 1941 as the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. During the ensuing year, most of the Jews, who had numbered about 1,000 in the 1920s, were murdered in the town and surrounding communities.

“It was more efficient to shoot small numbers than to transport them,” said Peter Black, senior historian with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “And the mass killing centers didn’t open until December of that year.”

The Nazis didn’t act alone. In some cases they were helped by local Christians who informed on the Jews.

Lynn said the Old World charm she encountered in Ivenets can never erase its bloody past. But she said the friends she made show there were good people during the darkest days and today.

One was a woman who as a 19-year-old nurse helped Jews hiding in the Nalabocka Forest region. The woman, who still lives near the forest, welcomed the Lynns into her home, served them lunch and raised a vodka toast to the resistance fighters.

Another was a museum curator — a middle-aged man who knew nothing about the Jews of Ivenets. Yet he was fascinated by Lynn’s research and asked her to send him the photographs from the memorial book. When Lynn left, he kissed her hand and embraced her husband.

“These were just amazing, wonderful people, and it was so wonderful to meet them and interact with them,” she said. “I never would have known about them if I hadn’t done this.”