The Assault

Mulisch tells Anton Steenwijk's story in five widely spaced episodes, 1945, 1952, 1956, 1966, 1981, each triggered by a chance encounter rather than by any effort of Anton's own, and the structure argues something specific about how atrocity actually reaches its survivors: not as a coherent narrative delivered whole, but as intrusion, a stranger at a party, an old acquaintance on the street, each holding one more fragment of a night Anton was too young and too traumatized to assemble at the time.

The mechanism behind his family's destruction turns out to be almost unbearably arbitrary: after the collaborator Fake Ploeg is shot by the resistance outside the Kortewegs' house, the terrified Korteweg family drags the body a few doors down and leaves it in front of the Steenwijks instead, ensuring the German reprisal falls on Anton's parents and brother rather than their own. Mulisch refuses his readers any moral logic to hold onto: no betrayal, no political stance, nothing the Steenwijks did explains why they burned and the Kortewegs didn't, only a handful of meters of Haarlem street.

That Anton grows up to become an anesthesiologist, a doctor whose entire practice is switching consciousness off rather than confronting it, is exactly the kind of detail Mulisch treats as too obvious to underline directly. A boy who survived by not fully registering what was happening to him chooses, as a man, a profession built on managed unconsciousness, and the novel lets the reader draw the connection between the two without ever pointing to it itself.

Mulisch anchors each of Anton's five encounters to an unmistakable moment in postwar politics, a hospital corridor in the early 1950s, the shock of 1956, campus unrest a decade later, disarmament marches by 1981, so his private history keeps arriving folded inside the era's public one, never sought out and never escaped.

Cor Takes, the resistance fighter who actually shot Ploeg, tracks Anton down decades later and presses him, almost violently, to take a political position on what happened, to feel something usable rather than simply survive it. Anton's stubborn refusal to supply Cor with the reckoning he wants becomes Mulisch's sharpest instrument for examining a Dutch postwar culture that preferred closure to confrontation, comfortable amnesia to the harder work Cor is demanding.

Ploeg's daughter Karin resurfaces in Anton's life insisting her father wasn't the monster the neighborhood still remembers, complicating a story that would otherwise sort neatly into villain and victims. Mulisch refuses to let Karin's grief cancel Ploeg's collaboration or let Ploeg's collaboration cancel Karin's grief, holding both at once as a way of resisting the tidy moral bookkeeping the rest of Dutch memory seemed eager to perform.