The Assault

“The motorboats were different. Pitching, their prows would tear the water into a V shape that spread until it reached both sides of the canal. There the water would suddenly begin to lap up and down, even though the boat was already far away. Then the waves bounced back and formed an inverted V, which interfered with the original V, reached the opposite shore transformed, and bounced back again—until all across the water a complicated braiding of ripples developed which went on changing for several minutes, then finally smoothed out. Each time, Anton tried to figure out exactly how this happened, but each time the pattern became so complex that he could no longer follow it.”

This is the last passage of the Prologue. Anton’s attempt at figuring out how the water forms such a complicated braid of ripples foreshadows the manner in which he will eventually construct a fuller image of the complexities surrounding the assault and its aftermath. The fact that Anton cannot fully figure out the ripples also foreshadows and broadcasts two of the novel’s major themes: the persistence of absurdity within the human experience as well as moral ambiguity. Ultimately, Anton’s engagement with the ripples in this passage is a metaphor for the process and result of Anton’s lifelong process of reckoning with his trauma. He will go through life examining disparate threads regarding the assault and begin to see how what happened to him was a braid of complexities. However, much like his engagement with the ripples here, an eventual piecing together of the entire puzzle of the assault will not grant a single definitive answer or conclusion. The density of complexity of the circumstances—that is, the “ripples” (5) here—ultimately prohibits tidy conclusions or even understanding.

“‘Very well translated, my boy. Except for one mistake. They are not rivers, plural, that come together, but two rivers.’

‘Where does it say that?’

‘Here: symballeton, that’s a duality, the coming together of two things, two. Now the two armies also make sense. This is a form you find only in Homer. Remember the word “symbol,” which comes from symballo, “to bring together,” “to meet.” Do you know what a symbolon was?’

‘No,’ said Peter in a tone implying that he couldn’t care less.

‘What was it, Papa?’ asked Anton.

‘It was a stone that they broke in two. Say I am a guest in another city, and I ask my host whether he would be willing to receive you too. How can he be sure that you really are my son? We make a symbolon. He keeps one half, and at home I give you the other. So then when you get there, they fit together exactly.’

‘That’s great,’ said Anton. I’m going to try that someday.’

Groaning, Peter turned away. ‘Why in God’s name should I learn all that?’”

This passage displays one of the only detailed glimpses of Mr. Steenwijk’s character. Mulisch’s spare and highly purposeful development of the deceased members of Anton’s family entreats the reader to find subtlety and nuance within the information given. Thus, Mr. Steenwijk is portrayed as a quietly nurturing, fastidious, gentle, and learned father—even in the face of Peter’s impatient insolence. Mr. Steenwijk’s expansion on the concept of duality and the symbol on foreshadow and symbolize Anton’s lifelong process of living both his present and his past simultaneously, while piecing together the metaphorical puzzle (which is here figured as a literal puzzle) of the assault.

“ln the middle of the deserted street, in front of Mr. Korteweg’s house, lay a bicycle with its upended front wheel still turning—a dramatic effect later much used in close-ups in every movie about the Resistance.”

This quote demonstrates the manner in which Mulisch will occasionally and unobtrusively insert pieces of contextual information within his narrative—which is generally more invested in the minutia of Anton’s life than its surrounding historical and political context. The wider cultural context within which Mulisch situates Anton’s experience never feels gratuitous or forced, as exemplified by this passage. The cultural reference provides the reader with a vivid flashpoint and evokes a familiar image that allows access to Anton’s experience with sensory immediacy. The cultural reference also cleverly asserts a central theme: beneath neat historical and political narratives lie complex and vivid human experiences. While most readers will be aware of the image of the upended bicycle with a spinning wheel, they here use that image to plug into Anton’s singular experience.

“Anton stood in the front of the crowd and, under Bos’s arm, stared at the back of the boy in the empty room. Then, slowly, Fake turned around and looked him straight in the eyes. All at once Anton was overcome by a pity for him such as he had never felt for anyone. How could Fake possibly go home, with that father of his? Before he knew what he was doing, Anton dove under Mr. Bos’s arm and sat down at his desk. This broke down the general resistance of the others. After school the principal stood waiting for him in the hall, caught him briefly by the arm, and whispered that he had probably saved Mr. Bos’s life. Anton didn’t quite know what to do with this compliment. He never told anyone at home about it, and the incident was never mentioned again.”

This passage details the significant moment in which Anton uses his compassion and empathy, as well as his innocence, to move within highly charged political contexts. It therefore demonstrates Mulisch’s aim of attending to the complexities of the distinct human experiences that lie beneath grand historical narratives. In terms of plot, the passage also chronicles an important and significant moment between Anton and Fake, which adds nuance and a bit of irony to their relationship. While, in this scene, Anton essentially saves and protects Fake Jr. from humiliation, it is the assassination of Fake’s father which will set into motion the execution of Anton’s family.

“The body in the gutter. The wheel had stopped turning. Above, the amazing starry sky. [Anton’s] eyes were used to the darkness now, and he could see ten times better than before. Orion lifting his sword, the Milky Way, one brilliant, shiny planet, probably Jupiter—not in centuries had Holland’s skies been this clear. On the horizon two slowly moving searchlights crossed each other and fanned out, but no plane could be heard. He noticed that he was still holding one of the dice in his hand and put it in his pocket.”

This passage describes Ploeg’s body as it lies in Anton’s street. The juxtaposition of this corpse determines so much of Anton’s life, and the cosmos exemplifies Mulisch’s sustained commitment to rendering layered complexity. Although Ploeg’s murder will reverberate throughout Anton’s individual life, Ploeg’s body is here depicted beneath the solar system—as if to signal that while Anton’s experience and Ploeg’s death are highly specific, there are ever larger contexts and complexities which surround them.

“This moment—his father cut out in black against the snow, his mother outside on the terrace under the starlight—became eternal, detached itself from all that had come before and all that would follow. It became part of him and began its journey through the rest of his life, until finally it would explode like a soap bubble, after which it might as well never have happened.”

This scene—one of Anton’s last memories of his parents—is inscribed like a tableau. Mulisch depicts it as a frozen, isolated moment in time that will exercise a powerful pull on Anton’s life. The depiction of the moment as “detached” speaks to the way that Anton will suppress his memories of the night, although it will continue to persistently haunt him. Curiously, too, this passage foreshadows the fact that Anton will, eventually, find resolution regarding his trauma and the deaths of his family members—although “as if it never happened” seems to be an extreme, if not also suppressive concept.

“Anton couldn’t believe it. Was it believable, this thing happening there? Desperately he searched for his father and mother, but because of those bright lights he couldn’t see anything. One stream of smoking light after another flew into the front room, the vestibule, the bedroom, and finally onto the thatched roof. They were really doing it; this could no longer be stopped. The house was burning inside and out. All his possessions, his books by Karl May, his Nature Studies of the Open Field, his collection of airplane pictures, his father’s library whose shelves were lined with green baize, his mother’s clothes, the ball of yarn, the chairs and tables: nothing was spared.”

This passage finds Anton in the backseat of the military vehicle into which he was deposited by “the Krauts”(19). He is already dissociating from the rapidly-moving traumatic events around him, which is evidenced by his doubting the veracity of the unfolding drama. However, the reality is undeniable, as he watches the fire irrevocably destroy the life and home he once knew.

“He imagined further on, between the cars, he caught a glimpse of his mother, her hair hanging loose, and a man running toward her. Something was taking place over there; but hardly anything could touch him anymore. He was thinking: how can they do this in the blackout? Before you know it, the English will see this and then they’ll come; if only they would come . . . On the sign attached at an angle although singed, was still readable: Carefree. In the rooms where it had been cold for so long, hellfire now reigned. Everywhere black soot fluttered down into the snow.”

This passage demonstrates the surrealistic or dream-like quality that the assault takes on for Anton—even as he is in the midst of experiencing it. The assertion that “hardly anything could touch him” (29) forecasts Anton’s lifelong orientation to his trauma, as he will spend much of the ensuing years nursing a numbness and avoidance of his great loss and trauma. His wish for the English to save him continues Mulisch’s depiction of the individual and human experiences beneath the historical narrative. While it is true that Allied forces would eventually arrive to liberate Anton’s city, his wish for the English in this moment is futile, and the assault took place at a time before which the Liberation could save him and his family.

“‘Listen. They’ll try and make you believe all kinds of things, but you must never forget that it was the Krauts who burned down your house. Whoever did it, did it, and not anyone else.’”

These words are spoken by Truus Coster (although she is heretofore unnamed) to Anton, as they share a jail cell in the basement of a police station. Eventually, Anton will speak the exact same words to his own daughter, Sandra, when she asks him whether Truus was the cause of Anton’s ordeal. This quote, and Anton’s eventual absorption and repetition of Truus’s words, demonstrates Mulisch’s message that ultimately, Truus’s wise words provide the key to arriving at any kind of resolution or peace in the midst of the chaos and horror of war. Her words acknowledge the complex array of moving parts that coalesced into the murder of Anton’s family, while also emphasizing the fact that ultimately, it was the Nazis who burned down Anton’s home and executed his family—and not the Resistance fighters. Anton’s eventual repetition of Coster’s words signals both the great significance that she, as a courageous and wise figure, holds in his life, as well as the manner in which he will eventually make peace with all that happened to him.

“‘For [the Nazis] everything his very simple, but for us it’s more complicated. We’ve got to become a little bit like them in order to fight them—so we become a little bit unlike ourselves. But they don’t have that problem; they can do away with us without any qualms. We first have to do away with something inside ourselves before we can do away with them. Not them; they can simply remain themselves, that’s why they’re so strong. But they’ll lose in the end, because they have no light in them. The only thing is, we mustn’t become too much like them, mustn’t destroy ourselves altogether, otherwise they’ll have won in the end….’”

These words are also spoken by Truus Coster to Anton. Here, she asserts her orientation toward both the Resistance and the Nazis. She is essentially saying that those who oppose the brutality and inhumanity of the Nazis must be careful not to lose their own compassion and humanity. Her words stand in stark contrast against the man that Cor Takes will eventually become and also forecast Anton’s eventual orientation toward his ordeal. Even prior to these words being spoken, Anton has shown himself to be a sensitive, empathetic person. As the story unfolds, he will continue to honor his own humanity as well as that of everyone involved in the assault—and he will eventually arrive at a philosophical place that is in accordance with Coster’s words and perspective. Takes, on the other hand, will become a hardened and ruthless person who Mulisch depicts as out of touch with his own humanity and that of others. This passage, therefore, produces an image of Coster as a kind of patron saint—a paragon of virtue and wisdom to which Anton will almost subconsciously hew.

“It was a Spitfire; no, a Mosquito; no, a Spitfire. Mesmerized, he stared at the shaky steel that approached as if it loved him. It could not harm him. He was, after all, on their side, they knew that, of course—even yesterday. From below the wings he saw some flashes crackle, minor incidents, hardly worth noticing. On the ground too, fire broke loose. It whistled and popped and rattled on all sides. He felt the blows of the impact, and because he thought the plane would ram into him, he dove below the dashboard while the motor bellowed above him like steam roller.”

In this moment, Anton is in the custody of the Germans, who are sustaining an attack by Allied forces. In the moment that a rocket hurdles toward him, Anton is more absorbed with determining what kind of rocket it is, than understanding or reacting to the immediate danger that he is in. This is emblematic of his overall approach to his trauma—he is an extremely cerebral person whose sense of order and logic sometimes impedes him from fully feeling or processing his emotions.

 “The first part of the story, about the assault and the fire, made Anton cry a little (but it was so long ago by now).”

In this scene, Anton is telling his experience of the assault to the Ortskommandantur. Even within hours of its occurrence, Anton has already begun to repress and suppress his memories of his trauma.

“Holding onto his uncle’s hand, without a coat but wearing the two sweaters, he walked out into the winter day. He was sobbing but hardly knew why, as if his tears had washed away his memories. His other hand felt cold. He stuck it into his pocket, where he touched something he could not place. He looked: it was one of the dice.”

This quote depicts the moment in which Anton’s uncle comes to retrieve him from Nazi custody. Anton is crying without knowing why: he is already going numb to his trauma and loss. However, the presence of the dice in his pocket—which he was about to throw for the board game that he and his family had begun playing at the time of the assault—signals the fact that although Anton has already begun to distance himself from his experience, it is still very temporally near him. The dice is also a potent and poignant symbol of the utter disruption and fracture that his life has irrevocably undergone.

“Boys his own age sat triumphantly on top of car radiators marked with white stars surrounded by circles. Yet he himself did not take part. Not because he was worried about his parents or Peter, for he never thought about that, but more because none of this was really a part of him or ever would be. His entire universe had become that other one which now fortunately had come to an end, and about which he never wanted to think again. Nevertheless, it was part of him, so that all in all, he didn’t have much left.”

In this scene, Liberation Day is in progress, and it is five months after the assault. Although Anton sees boys his own age celebrating in the streets, the Nazi Occupation did not end soon enough to spare his family members. He has dug his heels into his coping mechanism of suppression and repression, and therefore has made himself remote and almost impervious to both the celebration itself and its surrounding politics. His remoteness demonstrates his near-lifelong orientation to both the assault and the trauma of the war: although it is like his former life and the violence that took it from him never happened, in reality, he will never fully forget or escape it.

“For Anton that distance of five months between January and June 1945 was incomparably longer than the distance between June of 1945 and the present day [1952]. It was on this distortion of time that he later blamed his inability to explain to his children what the War had been like. His family had escaped from his memory, had retreated to a forgotten region of which he had only brief and random glimpses—as when he looked out of the window in school, or out of the rear platform on the trolley car—a dark region of cold and hunger and shooting, blood, flames, shouts, prison cells, hermetically sealed somewhere deep inside him. At such moments it was if he remembered a dream, but not so much what the dream had been about, as simply the fact that it had been a nightmare. Yet at the core of that hermetic darkness now and then flashed a single source of blinding light: the fingertips of the girl caressing his face. Whether she had anything to do with the assault, and what had happened to her, he did not know. He had no desire to know.”

This quote illustrates the depth of Anton’s repression. His perception of time is clouded and warped by his traumatic experience, and his own memories have become subterranean, buried deep within his psyche. Even the trauma itself is not remembered in detail, but as an atmospheric nightmare. However, the figure of Truus Coster has become a beacon of sorts: a beacon of love, wisdom, and light, which Anton will only be able to fully process and grasp when he is well into his forties.

“At a time when he still thought about such things, he had wondered what would happen if he drilled a tunnel right through the center of the earth and then jumped in, wearing a fireproof suit. After a certain amount of time that could be determined mathematically, he would arrive feet first, at the antipode, though he would not quite reach the surface. He would come momentarily to a standstill. Then he would disappear once more, upside-down, into the depths. After many years, also mathematically calculable, he would at last stop and remain floating, weightless, at the center of the earth, where he would be able to reflect upon the state of things in eternity.”

In this description of one of Anton’s reveries, the consistencies in his character are highlighted. Much like the moment in which he watched a rocket hurdle toward him and was more absorbed with determining exactly what kind of rocket it was than processing the immediate danger that he was in, he here takes a curiously scientific approach to his emotional life—musing that even his dream vision of tunneling to the center of the earth could correlate to real-world mathematical measurements. Anton thus seeks a kind of refuge within empiricism—it helps him to stave off the searing emotions that accompany his trauma. This image too speaks to Anton’s desire for complete isolation from his circumstances—although it does also display his underlying desire for the time and space to process and come to grips with what happened to him.

“Anton realized he was shivering. He felt in the presence of a nameless violence such as he had never known in anyone, except possibly in that man with the scar under his cheekbone. Should he say so? He didn’t. He didn’t want to give the impression that he was attacking Takes. Besides, it would be nothing new to Takes; clearly he had put such considerations behind him long ago.”

In this scene, Cor Takes has dragged Anton out of the café in order to surmise his own involvement with the assassination of Fake Ploeg. In Takes’s presence, Anton feels a violence that is only rivaled by the Nazi official who burst into his home, berated his parents, and ultimately oversaw their execution. By pairing Takes and the Nazi official, Mulisch drives home Coster’s assertion that Resistance fighters must take caution not to abandon their own humanity in their fight against Fascism. Takes has taken a philosophically opposing standpoint, and Mulisch thus communicates that Takes has lost some of his own humanity in favor of adopting an attitude of absolute violence against Fascism.

“Beyond the second sandbar, where he no longer touched bottom, the water became really cold. Yet it was a strange, unpleasant cold that seemed to rise out of the still, dead deep, penetrating his body without refreshing it. He swam about for a while. Though less than two hundred meters offshore, he no longer felt as if he belonged to the land. The coast—dunes, a lighthouse, low buildings with high antennas—stretched out in silence to the right and left, a world fundamentally different from the one he was in now. Suddenly he felt tired and alone, and his teeth began to chatter. He swam back as fast as he could, as if to escape a terrible danger that lay beyond the horizon. Gradually the sea grew warmer, and as soon as he touched the ground he waded to the shore. Near Saskia and Sandra it was as warm as bath water. Here he stretched out on his back on the hard ridges of sand, spread his arms, and gave a deep sigh.”

In this scene, Anton has ventured out into the water by himself during a day at the beach with Sandra and Saskia. His experience of isolation and coldness, which invoke death, symbolizes at least two distinct things. For one, it symbolizes the way in which Anton’s repression cuts him off from experiencing life. It also symbolizes the fact that Saskia and Sandra have become his emotional and psychological lifelines: they allow him to experience light, love, and life. When he sinks into his own psychological isolation, he therefore relinquishes his emotional anchors, which is a fearful thing that here threatens to engulf him. Anton’s (perhaps subconscious) choice in dealing with his trauma is a double-edged sword: while his repression seals him off from the profound pain and violence that he endured, it also cuts him off from fully experiencing and being present for the goodness of love and connection.

“Sandra began to whine, and Saskia took her back into the water. When they

emerged they walked, dripping, to a crowd that had gathered farther down, but a minute later Sandra came running in tears to Anton. Boys over there, she told him, were hacking with shovels at a purple jellyfish as big as a pancake, and the jellyfish was unable to fight back.”

This scene riffs on the fact that Anton did not wish to spare or shield Sandra from the gloominess of a funeral or an experience of death. Here, Sandra is confronted by a scene of irrational cruelty, destruction, and death—not during the funeral, but during a day at the beach. Through this occurrence, Mulisch communicates that death and cruelty are inescapable, but he also highlights the thread of absurdity that sometimes attends to human cruelty. The boys have no reason or motivation to hack the helpless jellyfish to death other than to revel in their own power to destroy. The scene also highlights a gender dynamic that is quietly maintained throughout the novel: it is markedly a group of boys, exclusively, who is undertaking the violence, while Sandra and Saskia, who are females, look on. This mirrors the manner in which Truus, a feminine figure, comes to symbolize the polar opposite and the salve to violence and trauma for Anton.

“In the deep twilight it was difficult to make the picture out, but he knew it well: Saskia in a black dress down to her ankles, her belly big with Sandra, who would be born a few days later. It was not true that he had never imagined what the woman whose name seemed to be Truus looked like. From the very beginning he had imagined her looking like this and not otherwise—like Saskia. This was what he had recognized in Saskia at first sight that afternoon at the Stone of Scone. She was the embodiment of an image he must have been carrying about in his head, without knowing it, since he was twelve. Her appearance revealed it to him—not as something remembered, but as immediate love, immediate certainty that she must remain with him and carry his child.”

This passage brings Mulisch’s engagement with gender to a climax. Anton has psychologically idolized Truus as a feminine figure who holds the key to love and human connection. Thus, he subconsciously understands that the woman whom he will marry and bear a child with must, in a way, be a version of Truus. While the violence of the war is resolutely gendered as male in Anton’s mind, his escape from it—and into a refuge of love and life—must be gendered as female. This is why he both subconsciously and consciously seeks out someone who mirrors the refuge that Truus provided him on the night of the assault in a romantic and life partner. Anton has psychologically formulated the idea of marriage—and its accompanying domesticity, romance, love, and child-bearing and raising as a means of escaping the violence and trauma of the assault.

“‘Was I crazy? What did those children have to do with it? Nothing at all, of course, not a thing. Just about as much as the Jewish kids that were being mass-murdered. Which means, nothing at all. But that’s just the point: you had to attack your enemy where he was most vulnerable, and if that meant his children—and naturally that’s what it meant—then you had to get him through his children. And what if the deal didn’t go through? Then, of course, the children would have to be sacrificed. Painlessly, in the anatomical institute.’ He threw a glance at Anton out of the corners of his eyes. ‘Yes, I’m sorry. I’m a worthless son of a bitch.’”

This quote documents Takes’s words to Anton during Anton’s visit to Takes’s home. In his monologue, he openly admits the depths to which he has sunken in his fight against Fascism: he is not above sacrificing innocent children for his cause. The significance of this is not lost on either Takes nor Anton: Anton himself was a child whose life was metaphorically sacrificed for the cause of the Nazis. Although Anton did not literally lose his life, he lost his own life as he knew it up to the point of the assault and its aftermath, and the Nazis had no regard for him, a child. Takes, therefore, demonstrates through his words that he has become what Truus counseled both himself and Anton from becoming. He has abandoned his own humanity in order to exact vengeance upon the Nazis.

“And then…and then…and then…Time passes. ‘That, at least, is behind us,’ we say, ‘but what still lies ahead?’ The way we word it, it’s as if our backs were turned to the past as we look toward the future; and that is, in fact, how we actually think of it: the future in front, the past behind. To dynamic personalities, the present is ship that drives its bow through the rough seas of the future. To more passive ones, it is rather like a raft drifting along with the tide. There is, of course, something wrong with both these images, for if time is movement, then it must be moving through another kind of time, and the secondary time through yet another; and thus time is endlessly multiplied. This is the kind of concept that does not please philosophers, but then, inventions of the heart have little to do with those of the intellect.”

This quote illustrates the third-person omniscient narrator. While the book is rich with dialogue, the narrator often parses Anton’s innermost thoughts and offers the philosophical backbone of the narrative. The reader is asked to interpret and glean meaning from characterizations and Anton’s interiority, and the narrator baldly offers thematic and conceptual conceits that the reader is invited to use to read into Anton’s experience and the narrative arc. Here, the narrator’s assertions about time can be mapped onto Anton’s lifelong experience of grappling with the assault. While he lives his day-to-day life, ostensibly on a forward-moving timeline, the events of his past exert a strong and undeniable presence—thereby disrupting the notion of time as neatly flowing in one direction.

“The Aartses, whom nobody could stand because they kept to themselves: they had saved the lives of three Jews, and those Jews, with their presence, had saved their own. In spite of everything, Korteweg had been a good man! So this was why Ploeg’s body had landed on the other side, at their own door, so that…Anton couldn’t take any more.”

This passage chronicles the last bit of climactic information that Anton receives about the night of the assault. Through a chance encounter with Karin Korteweg, Anton learns that Mr. Korteweg chose to dump Ploeg’s body at the Steenwijk doorstep instead of that of the Aartses because the Aartses were hiding Jews. While the Kortewegs’ act has heretofore gone unexplained, Anton finally has the last missing piece of the puzzle. This does not erase the violence and pain that Anton endured, but it demonstrates Truus’s actions and the sentiment that “everyone did what he did, and nothing else” (161). The Kortewegs did what they did in order to protect both the Jews that the Aartses were hiding and the Aartses themselves. Anton’s family was marked for slaughter in order to save the Jews whom the Nazis were brutally exterminating. This information also ultimately vindicates Korteweg in Anton’s mind, although Korteweg’s actions also led to the murder of Anton’s family and the utter destruction of Anton’s life. Anton, who is able to see beyond solely his perspective, is thus able to see the compassion and justice that motivated Korteweg’s actions and can therefore find some sense of peace and resolution for his own loss.