The Assault

This theme strongly pervades Mulisch’s entire narrative. Its earliest iteration probably occurs when Anton feels moved by his captor’s death. Schulz, the Nazi soldier who was responsible for transporting Anton on the night of the assault, is injured by an Allied bombing campaign and bleeds to death. Anton witnesses his death, and from his vantage point as a child who has just suffered a shocking trauma, the larger contexts of the war escape him. All he sees is a human being losing his life. Therefore, through the manner in which Mulisch depicts Anton’s character and experience, he communicates that war is not only about the ideological and political, but also about the smaller and immediate human experience. This assertion, in turn, makes absolute moral pronouncements difficult.

The driving incident of the entire narrative—the murder of Ploeg and the subsequent firebombing of Anton’s home and the murder of his entire family—also exemplifies this theme. For one, it seems unquestionable that it was right to assassinate Ploeg, the brutal and sadistic Nazi Inspector. However, the fact that the Resistance knew that reprisals for Ploeg’s death would befall innocent bystanders complicates the rightness of Ploeg’s assassination. While it is unquestionably true that Nazi forces and Nazi forces alone executed Anton’s family, it is equally true that had Coster and Takes not killed Ploeg, Anton’s family would not have been murdered. Additionally, by foiling Anton’s broad-sightedness against Takes’s wrathful and calcified cynicism, Mulisch asks the reader to question whether Takes was right or wrong. The ultimate conclusion, for Mulisch, is that Takes was neither fully right nor fully wrong—and that reality, which Anton must wrestle with for much of his life, is the only human truth to arise from the ordeal. Similarly, the revelation that the Kortewegs avoided dumping Ploeg’s body in front of the Aartses’ home because the Aartses were hiding Jews complicates Anton’s story: he at once sees the reason and rectitude of Mr. Korteweg’s decision—but this revelation cannot bring his family back from the dead. Again, someone who played a key role in the murder of the Steenwijks is both partly right and partly wrong.

In addition, by foregrounding Anton’s intensely personal and traumatic experience in intimate detail and by training his focus on the minutia of Anton’s life rather than the political, ideological, and/or economic contexts, Mulisch asks the reader to see the human story that lies beneath the grand historical or political narratives. Within those human stories are myriad complexities that make definitive moral judgments almost impossible.