The Assault

The Assault, with an introduction by Thomas Harding, is set during the winter of 1945, the last dark days of World War II. Occupied Holland waits for the Allies to arrive. In this tense atmosphere, a Dutch Nazi collaborator, Fake Ploeg, infamous for his cruelty, is assassinated while riding home on his bicycle. His body is moved from one family's doorstep to another along the same road, leading the remaining Germans to 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 chooses a carefully normal existence: a prudent marriage, a successful career as an anaesthesiologist, and a life of colourless passivity. However, the past keeps breaking through, with relentless memories and chance encounters with others involved in the assassination and its aftermath. In time, Anton finally learns what truly 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.