s we debate the proper way to remember Sept. 11, there are lessons for us from places that have lost their memories. I visited one recently: my mother's hometown in northeast Hungary. This town, Miskolc, does not feel like part of the Hungary I have carried in my heart since my family and I began our exile many years ago.

Sitting in a McDonald's, I am strangely grateful for its familiar, garish, American decor, a place of refuge from the rest of Miskolc, a town I waited decades to visit.

I have come to this place in search of the grandparents I never knew — or some memory of their world. I do not know what they looked like because no photographs or any other possessions survived their arrest and transport to Auschwitz sometime between June 11 and June 14, 1944.

In fact, scarcely a trace is left of a Jewish community that once made up one quarter of Miskolc's population of 75,000 — vanished as if by some natural phenomenon. At least that is what Miskolc, a sullen, economically depressed place, might like to believe.

My grandparents' home at 59 Szeles Utca, where my mother grew up, is now occupied by an insurance company. Standing frozen in front of it, I try to imagine what it was like on that early June morning (it was always early morning, that was Adolf Eichmann's way) when they began their final journey. I try to evoke an image, but I can't. Instead, I have only the cold facts: the Miskolc town prefect, Emil Borbely-Maczky, with help from local citizens, supervised the roundup of 10,000 women, children and old men (the young men had already been taken away to do forced labor). They were marched to the ghetto, then to the brickworks and on to the Auschwitz-bound wagons. Neighbors took their worldly goods. What personal property remained was transported to the synagogue, which was used as a warehouse for stolen Jewish property.

But I had trouble finding the synagogue. The guidebooks (including the Guide Michelin for Hungary) do not mention its existence. It is not clearly marked on maps. The local residents I stopped on the streets told me they never heard of any synagogue. I finally found "Heroes' Square," a sorry, ugly paved square with a church well described and marked in all the guidebooks. At the other end of the square, behind tall concrete barriers, a Moorish facade soars high. It is the synagogue built in 1861, and far larger than I ever imagined. At first glance I assumed the concrete slabs were memorial tablets to the 10,000 citizens who disappeared, but they were, in fact, designed to obscure the towering synagogue partly hidden behind them. There is no sign, no schedule of hours to mark the synagogue, only a giant padlock on the iron gate.

At noon the pub across the street opened for business. "Do you know when the synagogue opens?" I ask the peroxide-blonde bartender. "What synagogue?" she asks. "That one," I say pointing behind me. "Really? That's a synagogue?" She seems startled. "Why don't you ask the neighbors?" "You are the neighbors," I answer, suddenly angry.

I return to the synagogue and spot a buzzer just inside the padlocked gate. A middle-aged woman dressed in spandex pants and oversize T-shirt answers the bell. She looks annoyed. "I was just about to wash my hair," she says, fingering her long, bleached platinum tresses. I have come a very long way to visit this place, I tell her. My grandparents were deported from here. She shrugs, but opens the heavy gate. Surprisingly, there is construction work underway. "Americans," she tells me. The interior wall of the courtyard is crowded with marble plaques honoring "the innocent people" who were "deported in the most brutal and dehumanizing manner." The language is strong, even moving. But who sees these plaques behind locked gates? Not the people in the pub across the street, not those at the McDonald's a few blocks away, certainly not young Hungarians.

As I walk the bleak streets of Miskolc, I scan the faces of passersby. Where were you, where were your parents, what did you do before, during or after the disappearance of one quarter of your town's population? Were your parents my grandparents' neighbors? I feel slightly ashamed for thinking that these people share a collective guilt. But I cannot help it. The town of Miskolc has buried its past and so cannot expect redemption.

Yet, even now, 58 years later, it is not too late for an honest reckoning. In neighboring Poland, local historians have recently concluded that the massacre of Jews in the town of Jedwabne in 1941 was carried out by Poles, not Nazis. This belated acknowledgment has already improved relations between Jews and Poles. Elsewhere in Central Europe, Serbs are now torn between those who are ready to confront the tragedy of Bosnia, and those who wish the whole issue of ethnic cleansing would go away. Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica has said the sight of Slobodan Milosevic in the dock makes him "sick to my stomach" — language he never used to describe the carnage. Meanwhile Serbia's prime minister, Zoran Djindjic, is calling for greater exposure of the crimes of the past.

Miskolc is not unique in fleeing its history. There are many other Miskolcs in the world, places where great crimes were committed and then buried. Without memory, these places pay the price of collective guilt. And for the people themselves, there can be no reconciliation. That is the bitter lesson of the age of genocide.

Of course, acknowledging crimes does not erase them. No amount of honest reckoning will bring back my grandparents or their lost community. But this is not about the dead. Those living in a dark place, ignorant of their own history, are the ones at risk. Miskolc will remain a place of averted eyes, sour and soulless, as long as those tablets honoring its victims stay behind a padlocked iron gate.

Kati Marton is the author, most re cently, of ``Hidden Power: Presidential Marriages That Shaped Our His tory.''