Elisa Hategan is exploring the dark and universal road that transforms the tormented into the tormentor, a path she travelled as a young girl engulfed by hatred.

On a recent afternoon in Sibiu, a Romanian city in the heart of Transylvania, the North York resident visited the school where she believes her course was set.

She ran her fingers over the heavy wooden doors and thought of her abusive parents, who met as students at the boarding school for the deaf.

“I don’t think either of them had a chance to begin with,” she said.

As a teenager, Hategan, 40, was a standout in Toronto’s now-defunct Heritage Front, an ultra right-wing group with ties to Holocaust deniers and former Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi.

But in 1993, when the Front’s harassment of LGBTQ activists raised questions about her own sexuality, Hategan turned on the white supremacist organization.

Then known as Elisse, she secretly provided information to anti-racist activists, testified against Front leaders in Federal Court and appeared voluntarily as a witness in Parliament after a founder of the racist group, Grant Bristow, was exposed as a CSIS informant.

In 2013, in a stunning about-face, Hategan converted to Judaism after discovering her family’s Jewish roots.

Her transformation is still underway.

For more than a decade, she’s been trying to understand what led her into the arms of the most prominent white supremacist group in recent Canadian history — and what drives the innocent to hate.

She is chronicling the journey in a new book, Remember Your Name: A Memoir of Loss, Love & Hate, which she is financing through a crowd-funding campaign. Once again, her research has led her back to her family’s troubled history in her native Romania, where she is now.

“I am hoping to show that there is both good and bad in each of us, and all of us have the potential within — given extreme circumstances — to be abused and abuser,” she said. “I can’t see any other way of overcoming my legacy of hatred than to look that terrible past in the eye.”

Hategan was drawn to the Heritage Front by many of the same factors that have always propelled disconnected youth to extremism.

Raised in Bucharest by deaf parents who she says abused her, Hategan’s circumstances worsened at age 9, when her mother took off to Italy for several years, leaving her alone with her father.

“He hated everybody,” she said. “He could rant about Jews one day and the government another day.”

At age 11, Hategan and her father followed her mother to Toronto, settling in Regent Park. Her father didn’t last long. He returned to Romania, and died when Hategan was 13.

After running away from her violent mother, Hategan landed in a group home.

“I was the only white girl there. I was teased because I didn’t fit in,” said Hategan, who dropped out of school in Grade 9. “I was very angry. I started to have racist feelings toward blacks.”

After returning home at age 16, she saw a TV program on white supremacy, and contacted the group through a P.O. Box number that flashed during the broadcast.

“They wrote me with the address of the Heritage Front,” she recalls.

When she first met the group’s leaders, including notorious white supremacist Wolfgang Droege, who was shot dead in Toronto in 2005, she believed their message was more one of pride than hate.

“It felt more familiar to me to be around Europeans . . . who didn’t make me feel bad because I didn’t fit into Canadian society,” she said.

In 1991, the Heritage Front invited journalists to a cultural hall in Toronto for what reporter Bill Dunphy considered the group’s “coming out party.”

Hategan was front-and-centre.

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“She was presented as the future of the movement,” said Dunphy, who covered the Front for the Toronto Sun and now works for the Hamilton Spectator. “She was an angry speaker . . . She projected power.”

Hategan said she began to question the Front’s ideology when she felt pressured to sleep with men in the movement. Meanwhile, she says the group began harassing members of the LGBTQ community.

“One of the activists they targeted was someone that I had a crush on. And it was a woman,” said Hategan, who realized at 17 that she was gay. “That’s really what hit me on a deeper level.”

With nowhere else to go, Hategan secretly sought refuge with anti-racist activists. “They basically deprogrammed me,” she said.

For several months, she spied on the Front, and collected information for the activists and police.

She was charged with a hate-related crime in 1993 for distributing a document called “Animal Life Series No. 1,” which compared black people to gorillas. But the charges were dropped after it was revealed she gave the document to two members of an anti-racist group to warn them about the Front.

Toronto human rights lawyer Paul Copeland defended Hategan, and was there when she testified against Droege.

“I thought she was a very gutsy young woman that had seen the light of day,” he said.

Hategan’s testimony helped put Droege and several other members away for several months. By the time Bristow was exposed in the summer of 1994, the organization had all but crumbled.

Hategan got her high school diploma, graduated from university, and began delving into her past. While visiting an uncle in Romania in 2001, she found a lacquered box that had belonged to her grandmother. It was inscribed with a surname she had never seen before: Kohan, the Hungarian version of the common Jewish surname, Cohen.

Hategan, who changed her first name to Elisa in 2006, soon discovered that her father’s mother, as well as his father — who had abandoned his illegitimate son — were both Jewish.

“He had a lot of anger toward Jews,” she said of her father. “I’m assuming it was because he was rejected.”

These days, Hategan lives quietly with her partner in North York, working as a writer.

Her memoir, Race Traitor, which she self-published in 2014, is deeply personal. But her current project is more visceral.

If she can raise the funds, she plans to spend a few more months in Romania, tracing the roots of the hatred that consumed her parents.

Hategan still sees her mother, who suffers from Alzheimer’s and is in a Toronto hospital.

But it is in Romania where she continues to uncover the truth about her father, who was teased and tormented as a child because of his deafness.

She describes the process as “healing.”

“The act of dissecting their hate has actually led me to love them, because I understand how the abuses and oppression of their lives contributed to their brutality,” she said. “It’s awful and painful and ugly at times, but it’s enabled me to forgive them — something I never thought I could do before.”