GRANT IN AMAZING PILGRIMAGE

A HUMBLE wooden cross marks the spot in a desolate Arctic forest where Avram Grant endured the most emotional experience of his life.

Portsmouth's new director of football bends down between the trees to scatter soil on the unmarked graves of his grandparents.

It was the culmination of his heart-rending pilgrimage to the former Soviet prison camp in the Komi republic where his relatives perished at the hands of Stalin during World War II.

The makeshift cross, with a simple Russian inscription, and a broken fence are all that mark the mass graveyard where Grant's teenage father buried his parents with his bare hands in small hollows in the frozen ground.

But it is a place the 54-year-old Israeli HAD to visit.

"I will never forget it," says the former Chelsea manager. "I went through one of the most emotional and moving experiences of my life in Komi.

"I'm going to bring my children here."

Grant made the harrowing pilgrimage deep into the Arctic Circle just weeks before being installed as Pompey's new director of football.

The ex-Chelsea boss, sacked 17 months ago by the Blues' billionaire owner Roman Abramovich, has returned to former club Pompey following the takeover by Ali al-Faraj.

With Portsmouth rooted to the bottom of the Premier League, Grant faces a massive job in keeping them up. But it is nothing compared to the enormity of his 2,013-mile journey to Komi.

Russian government officials opened Secret Service files, enabling him to track the fate of his grandparents and two aunts, who died before he was born.

After a two hour-flight from Moscow into Syktyvkar, where Abramovich's relatives were exiled, a 50-minute helicopter ride and another two-hour journey on foot, Grant arrived at the abandoned prison camp at Rabog.

He was accompanied by a rabbi as he stared solomnly at the cross.

Then he asked to be left alone, wandered into the woods and prayed.

"I don't remember if I was weeping or not," he recalls. "I was thinking about my dad - who survived - and my dead relatives, for whom there was no escape. I feel I got rid of a heavy stone on my heart which I had carried throughout all of my life."

Incredibly, while Grant was on his pilgrimage, his father Meir, 81, woke from a seven-week coma.

Grant: Emotional moment

An onlooker at Komi added: "It was hard even to imagine what he felt as he stood there.

"He asked to be left alone. He prayed for a long time. In Jewish tradition he threw on to the graves earth he brought from the sacred land of Jerusalem. He lit candles. And he collected a handful of soil to keep for remembrance."

As a teenager growing up in Israel, Grant remembers Meir shrieking in his sleep from nightmares brought on by memories of digging his parents' graves.

Grant said: "He put them in without even a piece of cloth to wrap them in, then covered them with the permafrost soil on their faces with his same hands. Since then the memory of those days came back to him in nightmares."

And after Grant was sacked by Abramovich 17 months ago, he confided to a friend: "It is my dream to go and find their graves."

Russian records reveal his grandfather Abram Granat died of a heart attack on January 5, 1941, aged 54 - the same age as Avram is now.

Granat's wife Ruda perished from pneumonia four months later.

Grant confirmed to Russian researchers that the family had changed their name - losing the final 'a' - after leaving the USSR, and that his father's sisters Sara, 14, and Rachel, 3, were also buried at Rabog.

Igor Rabiner, who assisted Grant with his visit, explained: "Until 1939 the Grant (Granat) family lived near Warsaw. When the German troops occupied Poland, many Jews escaped to the Eastern part of the country, which was under Soviet control.

"The Grants later attempted to return home, but the Nazis only allowed back Polish and Ukranians - not the Jews. It saved the family from the Holocaust gas chambers.

"But safe from Hitler's hell, in 1940 the family found themselves embroiled in Stalin's. Avram's grandparents, their son and two daughters, were put into cargo railway carriages and sent to Komi to work cutting timber.

"In winter they toiled for 10 hours a day, waist-deep in snow without proper boots or clothes. All sorts of diseases spread among the people."

In 1946, Grant's father - then 18 - boarded a ship for Israel, but it was intercepted by the Royal Navy and he was thrown in jail in Cyprus. He finally arrived in Israel a year later and met Avram's mother, a Jew who had fled from Iraq.

In Syktyvkar, Grant was told how Abramovich's ancestors were hauled on to a cattle train from their home in Lithuania a few months after the Grants.

An old friend of Roman's father Arkady took Grant to the graves of the Chelsea tycoon's parents, where he left a large bunch of flowers.

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