The Assault, by Harry Mulisch

★★★★★ — A Dutch classic that earns every star.

I picked up The Assault on a whim in the gift shop at H’Art (formerly the Hermitage) in Amsterdam. I’d heard Harry Mulisch described as one of the great Dutch authors, and the description on the back hooked me. Within a few pages, I understood why this novel is considered a classic.

The story begins in the final months of World War II. Twelve-year-old Anton Steenwijk lives with his family in Haarlem when a Nazi-collaborating policeman is shot in front of a neighbor’s house. In a desperate act of self-preservation, those neighbors drag the body in front of the Steenwijks’ home. When the Nazis arrive, they assume Anton’s family is responsible. His parents are arrested, their house burned, and Anton’s world is destroyed in a single night.

Anton survives, grows up in postwar Amsterdam, and tries to move on — but the memory won’t stay buried. Over the decades he encounters people who, piece by piece, reveal what really happened that night. Each meeting forces him to re-examine guilt, blame, and the murky moral territory of survival.

Mulisch uses Anton’s story to explore how ordinary people get caught in history’s crossfire. No one is entirely guilty, and no one entirely innocent. The book asks uneasy questions: Is killing ever justified? How do we live with what we did — or didn’t — do?

Despite its grim premise, The Assault never feels oppressive. Mulisch writes with clarity and restraint, capturing the cold hunger of wartime Holland and the psychic frost that lingers afterward. The translation preserves the rhythm of his prose and the emotional precision of his storytelling.

By the end, Anton’s journey isn’t about vengeance but understanding — a quiet reckoning with the past that finally brings a measure of peace.

A haunting, philosophical masterpiece that reminds us: the war may end, but the questions it leaves behind never do.