The Assault

The Assault (original title in Dutch: De Aanslag) is a 1982 novel by Dutch author Harry Mulisch. Random House published an English translation by Claire Nicolas White in 1985. It covers 35 years in the life of the lone survivor of a night in Haarlem during World War II when the Nazi occupation forces, finding a Dutch collaborator murdered, retaliate by killing the family in front of whose home the body was found. According to the New York Times, this novel "made his reputation at home and abroad". It was translated into dozens of languages and immediately adapted into a film of the same name that won the 1986 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

The novel consists of a brief prologue and five "episodes" dated 1945, 1952, 1956, 1966, and 1981.

Twelve-year-old Anton Steenwijk is living with his parents and older brother on the outskirts of Haarlem in January 1945 under Nazi Occupation. One evening they hear shots and discover that Fake Ploeg, a prominent Dutch collaborator, has been shot. They watch as their neighbors, the Kortewegs, a father and his teen-age daughter, move the body from where it fell in front of their house to a position in front of the Steenwijks' house. In the chaotic hours that follow, Anton's family is killed and their house torched, while he spends a night in a dark police station cell in Heemstede being comforted by an unseen young woman prisoner. As Nazi authorities transport him to Amsterdam a German soldier dies trying to protect him when the convoy is attacked from the air. They place him in the care of an aunt and uncle there.

The author writes: "All the rest is postscript–the cloud of ash that rises from the volcano, circles around the earth, and continues to rain down on all its continents for years." In the decades that follow, Anton becomes an anesthesiologist, marries twice, and has a child by each of his wives. He lives with his repressed memories and limited understanding of the events that destroyed his family, uncertain of others' motivations that night and suppressing any instinct to discover more about the way events unfolded, though what he knows is incomplete and presents riddles more than resolution. He learns more details through a series of chance encounters, not by seeking out witnesses and survivors. Only occasionally do his emotions overwhelm him. He weighs motivations and unintended consequences, the moral judgments made and risks taken, the interplay of intention and accident, the actions he and his brother and parents took or failed to take. Anton's discoveries take place against the background of the emergence of Dutch society from the war, the development of new political alignments associated with the Cold War, the anti-establishment Provo movement, and a huge anti-nuclear demonstration.