The Plot

Plot in a nutshell. 

The author's research led him to some little known facts of the Lithuanian participation in the holocaust. For starters, as he found out, it was a group of Lithuanian thugs, called the Ypitanga Burys (200 young men), who murdered the vast majority of Jews and not the Nazis. Every day they would march 300 men, woman and children from the ghetto in Vilnius to the Panery forest, make them undress and then shoot them in shallow graves. In this way they exterminated 98% of all remaining Lithuanian Jews, the highest rate of any European country. From 1941 to 1945, between them and the Nazis, they murdered 250 000 Lithuanian Jews. Since 1991, when Lithuania gained independence from Russia, only 3 war criminals have ever stood trial, two have been found guilty but haven’t served a sentence. Today almost 3000 Jews remain in Lithuania. Amongst them are survivors like Rochel Margolis and Faina Branstovky. Astonishingly, in 2011, they stand accused by the Lithuanian government of collaborating with the Russians against the Lithuanians and Germans. They are 87. 

With this as backdrop, the story commences in Buenos Aires 1995. Our protagonist is the leader of a Mossad mission to capture the escaped leader of the Ypitanga Burys. He becomes party to a secret that is the adventure of “The Purpose of Killing a Jew.”

The Purpose of Killing a Jew