The Assault

An instant classic challenging notions of post-war innocence and guilt that sold over 200,000 copies on first publication in Dutch

With an introduction by Thomas HardingDuring the winter of 1945, the last dark days of World War II stretch out in occupied Holland as the populace wait for the Allies to arrive. A Dutch Nazi collaborator, Fake Ploeg, infamous for his cruelty, is assassinated as he rides home on his bicycle. His body is moved from one family's doorstep to another along the same road and the remaining Germans retaliate by burning down the final house and killing its inhabitants. Only their twelve-year-old son Anton survives.The Assault traces the complex repercussions of this horrific incident on Anton's life. Determined to forget, he opts for a carefully normal existence: a prudent marriage, a successful career as an anaesthesiologist, and colorless passivity. But the past keeps breaking through, in relentless memories and in chance encounters with others who were involved in the assassination and its aftermath, until Anton finally learns what really happened that night in 1945-and why.Powerful in its emotional restraint, lucid on the hardest of moral questions and fiercely moving, The Assault is an excavation of Dutch collaboration, resistance and the terrible collateral damage wrought on innocent people in times of war