The Assault Summary, Characters and Themes | Harry Mulisch

The Assault by Harry Mulisch is a novel about memory, guilt, war, and the long afterlife of a single violent event. The story begins in Nazi-occupied Holland, where twelve-year-old Anton Steenwijk’s family is destroyed after a collaborator is assassinated outside their home.

Anton survives, but the incident follows him through adulthood in fragments, encounters, and delayed revelations. Rather than presenting war as a closed historical event, the novel shows how the past keeps returning through people, politics, accidents, and buried truths.

Summary

Anton Steenwijk is twelve years old when his life is changed forever during the final winter of the Second World War. He lives with his parents and older brother, Peter, in a house called Carefree on the outskirts of Haarlem.

Their small row of houses sits near the water, isolated from the city and surrounded by fields. The war has reduced ordinary life to hunger, cold, darkness, and waiting.

Anton’s family spends most of its time in one room, conserving fuel and food while trying to keep some routine alive. His father reads and teaches Peter, his mother repairs clothes, and Anton moves through childhood with a mixture of fear, hunger, curiosity, and innocence.

One January evening in 1945, while the family is playing a board game, gunshots break the silence outside. A man has been killed in the street.

Peter looks out and discovers that the dead man is Fake Ploeg, a feared Dutch police inspector and Nazi collaborator. Ploeg’s son, also named Fake, is in Anton’s class, and Anton remembers the boy as isolated and burdened by his father’s politics.

The family is horrified, not only by the murder but by what it will mean. Nazi reprisals are expected, and whoever appears responsible will suffer.

The body originally lies in front of the Kortewegs’ house. Mr. Korteweg and his daughter Karin drag it away and place it in front of the Steenwijks’ home.

Peter is furious and tries to move it before the Germans arrive. In the confusion, he takes Ploeg’s gun and runs toward the Kortewegs’ house.

German soldiers soon descend on the street. Anton’s parents are arrested, their home is searched, and their possessions are destroyed.

Their house is set on fire while Anton is separated from his mother and father. He is taken away in a car, not yet fully understanding that he will never see them again.

At the police station, Anton is placed in a dark cell with an unknown woman. She comforts him, holds him, and speaks to him about war, hatred, love, and the danger of becoming like the enemy one fights.

She tells him not to reveal too much and warns him that the Germans will try to blame the Resistance. Anton cannot see her face, but her tenderness leaves a lasting mark on him.

She speaks of light and darkness, of love as something that gives people beauty, and of hatred that may become dangerous even when it begins as resistance to evil. Anton is too young to understand everything, but he feels protected by her presence.

Soon he is removed from the cell and sent on through German military channels. A German officer reacts with disgust that a child has been locked up with a prisoner.

Anton is moved from place to place and eventually sent toward Amsterdam, where his uncle and aunt live. During the journey, the convoy is attacked by an Allied aircraft, and a German sergeant named Schulz, who had been kind to Anton, is killed.

Anton feels guilt over Schulz’s death, even though he has done nothing. This mixture of fear, kindness, violence, and guilt becomes part of the confusion that surrounds his memory of the war.

Anton reaches his uncle Peter Van Liempt and aunt in Amsterdam. After liberation, he learns that his parents were executed with other hostages on the night of the assault.

Later, he also learns that Peter was killed. He grows up in his aunt and uncle’s orderly home, but he keeps the past at a distance.

He avoids books and information about the Occupation. He does not search official records.

He does not return to Haarlem for years. The event has not disappeared, but Anton survives by refusing to examine it closely.

As a medical student in the early 1950s, Anton unexpectedly returns to Haarlem for a party. The visit unsettles him, and he leaves early to see the site of his old home.

His house is gone, replaced by empty growth and ruins beneath vegetation. He visits Mrs. Beumer, the old neighbor, who remembers the night and tells him about a memorial bearing his parents’ names.

Anton goes to the monument and sees their names among those of the dead. The visit reveals how much he has shut away.

When he returns to Amsterdam and asks why his aunt and uncle never told him about the memorial, they say they did tell him, but he has no memory of it. This frightens him because it shows that parts of his past have fallen into a deep inner silence.

Years later, in 1956, Anton encounters Fake Ploeg Jr. during anti-Communist unrest in Amsterdam. Fake, now an adult, is angry, bitter, and shaped by his father’s death.

Anton invites him inside, and the two men argue. Fake insists that his father was not a criminal in the way people say and blames the Resistance for causing the reprisals that killed Anton’s family.

Anton challenges him to admit that his father may have been guilty while still loving him as a father. Fake cannot separate love from justification.

The conversation reveals that both men are sons of dead fathers, both damaged by the same event, yet standing on opposite sides of its meaning. Their meeting ends violently when Anton smashes a mirror with the stone Fake had carried, and the stove erupts in soot.

Before leaving, Fake remembers that Anton once helped him at school when others rejected him for wearing a Nazi youth uniform.

Anton becomes an anesthesiologist, a profession that suits his emotional habits. He works at the edge of consciousness, pain, and memory.

He marries Saskia, a stewardess whose appearance and presence affect him instantly. Her father, De Graaff, is a former Resistance leader and diplomat.

Through this marriage, Anton enters circles of people who lived through the war in active political and military ways, unlike his own passive survival.

At a funeral in 1966, Anton overhears a man describing the shooting of Fake Ploeg. The man is Cor Takes, a former Resistance fighter.

Anton realizes he is hearing the missing account of the attack. He speaks to Takes, and the two go outside.

Takes tells Anton that Ploeg was a brutal torturer and murderer who had to be killed. Anton tells him that the body was not originally in front of his house but had been moved there by the Kortewegs.

This is new information for Takes. Anton also learns that the woman in the dark cell was Truus Coster, Takes’s great love and fellow Resistance member.

She had helped shoot Ploeg and had been wounded during the escape. She was later executed.

This discovery deeply affects Anton. Truus, who had existed in his memory only as a voice, touch, and darkness, becomes a real person.

He visits Takes and sees her photograph. The image shocks him because it connects with his first impression of Saskia, as though his love for Saskia may have been shaped by the unknown woman who comforted him as a child.

Anton struggles with this thought but eventually understands that memory and desire do not work in simple lines. Truus had created an image in his mind, and Saskia had awakened it.

Anton’s life continues. He divorces Saskia, marries Liesbeth, has a son named Peter, and maintains a complex but friendly relationship with his first family.

He becomes prosperous, owns several houses, and seems outwardly settled. Yet anxiety still breaks through.

Objects and memories trigger panic. The war appears to recede, but it is never fully gone.

When his daughter Sandra becomes a teenager, Anton takes her to Haarlem and shows her where his family died. He also tells her about Truus, and suddenly remembers something Truus said in the cell: the man she loved believed she did not love him, but she did.

Anton realizes that Takes had been wrong all those years. He wants to find him and tell him, but Takes has vanished.

The final revelation comes in 1981 during a massive demonstration against nuclear weapons. Anton, drawn into the crowd almost against his will, meets Karin Korteweg.

She tells him what happened after Peter ran into her house with the gun. Peter threatened her and her father but did not shoot them.

The Germans arrived and killed him. Karin and her father were questioned and released.

Her father later moved them to New Zealand because he feared Anton’s revenge, and eventually killed himself.

Anton finally learns why Mr. Korteweg moved Ploeg’s body to the Steenwijks’ house rather than the other neighbor’s. The Aartses, who lived on the other side, were hiding Jews.

Korteweg had wanted to protect them. His choice condemned Anton’s family, yet it also saved others.

Even worse, Karin reveals that her father was also partly driven by concern for his beloved lizards, which he feared would die if their house was burned. Afterward he killed the lizards himself, unable to bear the meaning of what had happened.

This truth leaves Anton with no simple answer. The past is not cleanly divided into guilty and innocent people.

Each person acted from fear, love, loyalty, ignorance, or duty, and the consequences spread beyond anyone’s control. In the crowd, Anton reunites with his son Peter and holds his hand.

The demonstration’s collective shout rises and fades. Anton is carried along among thousands of people, still marked by the war, still alive, and still moving through a world where memory eventually quiets, but never fully disappears.

Characters

Anton Steenwijk

In The Assault, Anton Steenwijk is the central figure through whom the reader experiences the long effect of wartime violence. As a child, he is observant, quiet, and still partly protected by innocence.

He notices water, light, objects, sounds, and small domestic details, but he cannot understand the moral scale of what is happening around him. The murder of Fake Ploeg destroys his family and leaves Anton alive as the accidental survivor.

His survival is not heroic; it is confusing, passive, and full of unprocessed guilt. As he grows older, Anton’s main defense is avoidance.

He avoids war books, official archives, political commitment, and emotional confrontation. He becomes an anesthesiologist, a fitting profession for someone drawn to suspended consciousness and controlled pain.

His adult calm hides deep fractures. Encounters with Fake Jr., Takes, Truus’s memory, Sandra, and Karin gradually force him to face the event from multiple angles.

Anton is not a man who searches for truth aggressively; truth finds him through chance meetings. His character shows how trauma may remain quiet for years while still shaping love, work, memory, and identity.

Peter Steenwijk

Peter is Anton’s older brother, and his brief presence carries great force. He is seventeen, hungry, restless, and old enough to understand danger more clearly than Anton.

When Ploeg’s body is placed before the Steenwijk house, Peter reacts with urgency because he knows innocence will not protect them. His attempt to move the body is both brave and desperate.

Taking Ploeg’s gun is the mistake that seals his fate, yet it is also the action of someone trying to protect his family in a situation where there is no safe choice. Peter’s anger at his parents’ hesitation exposes the gap between youthful action and adult paralysis.

After his death, he remains frozen in Anton’s memory as forever seventeen, even when Anton becomes older than Peter ever was. His name later passes to Anton’s son, showing how the dead continue to live inside family memory.

Peter represents the impossible burden placed on the young during war: he is expected to act, yet every possible action is dangerous.

Mr. Steenwijk

Anton’s father is a quiet, intellectual man who works as a clerk and approaches life through thought, order, and language. His explanation of symbols and dual meanings early in the story becomes important because the whole book is shaped by broken signs, separated halves, and meanings that only become clear years later.

Yet when immediate danger arrives, his reflective nature leaves him almost powerless. He cannot respond decisively when the body appears before the house.

His silence and shock are not cowardice in a simple sense; they show the collapse of a man whose habits of mind are useless against sudden terror. His apology to his wife reveals that he understands disaster is closing around them but cannot stop it.

In Anton’s later life, his father becomes part of a lost world of books, restraint, and domestic order. He also becomes a standard against which Anton measures himself, especially when Anton one day realizes he has lived longer than his father did.

Mrs. Steenwijk

Anton’s mother, Thea Steenwijk, is associated with warmth, domestic care, and fragile strength under deprivation. She repairs clothing, manages hunger, and tries to preserve family life during the occupation.

When Ploeg’s body is moved, her instinct is moral rather than strategic: she believes their innocence should matter. This belief proves tragically unsuited to the reality of Nazi reprisal.

Her concern for Peter, her horror as the family is taken away, and the later report that she attacked the German leader all suggest a woman whose love can become fierce when her family is threatened. Anton’s last images of her are visual and physical: her hair, her hand, her expression, her movement in the night.

These impressions stay with him more than clear words do. She represents the ordinary person caught in political violence, not because she chooses a side publicly, but because war enters the home and destroys the distinction between private life and history.

Truus Coster

The moral pressure of The Assault sharpens around Truus Coster, even though Anton meets her only in darkness and knows her name much later. In the cell, she becomes a source of tenderness and moral instruction.

She comforts Anton when he is most alone, but she also speaks with the seriousness of someone who has chosen danger knowingly. Her ideas about light, love, hatred, and the need to resist Fascism without becoming Fascist are among the book’s most important moral statements.

Truus is both loving and militant, gentle with a child yet involved in killing Ploeg. This combination prevents any simple judgment of her.

To Takes, she is the lost beloved whose memory governs his life. To Anton, she first exists as touch and voice, later as a photograph, and finally as a human being whose love he remembers too late to deliver fully to Takes.

Truus represents resistance as both necessary and morally costly.

Cor Takes

Cor Takes is a former Resistance fighter whose life remains fixed around the assassination of Ploeg and the death of Truus. Unlike Anton, Takes has not avoided the past; he has lived inside it.

He speaks in hard, direct moral terms and insists that Ploeg’s death was necessary because Ploeg himself committed evil. His argument is based on individual responsibility: a killer is responsible for killing, and blame should not be shifted away from the person who acts.

Yet Takes is not morally clean or comfortable. He admits that resistance led him toward brutality, including actions and possibilities that resemble the enemy’s methods.

His devotion to Truus gives him emotional depth, but it also traps him in repetition. He wants Anton to remember what Truus said because he needs confirmation that she loved him.

Takes serves as Anton’s opposite: active where Anton was passive, obsessed where Anton is evasive, politically formed where Anton is detached. Their meeting forces both men to face what they lack.

Fake Ploeg Sr.

Fake Ploeg Sr. is physically absent after the opening event, but his influence drives the plot. He is a collaborator, police inspector, torturer, and symbol of local terror.

To the Resistance, he is a necessary target. To the Steenwijks, he is the dead body whose placement destroys their family.

To his son, he is a father who must be defended against public hatred. The book does not soften his crimes, but it complicates the consequences of his death.

Killing him may be justified, yet the act triggers reprisals that harm the innocent. Ploeg’s character matters because he is both a human being with a family and an agent of cruelty within an occupying system.

His death exposes the central moral problem of violent resistance: evil may need to be opposed, but the results of opposition cannot always be controlled. Ploeg remains a dark center around which many lives continue to move.

Fake Ploeg Jr.

Fake Ploeg Jr. is one of the most important mirror figures for Anton. As a child, he is isolated because of his father’s collaboration and Nazi affiliation.

Anton once shows him kindness at school, stepping into the classroom when others reject him, and Fake remembers this act years later. As an adult, Fake is bitter and defensive.

His life has been damaged by his father’s death and his family’s disgrace. He envies Anton’s education and social position, seeing both of them as proof of unfairness.

Fake’s tragedy is that his love for his father becomes tied to denial. He cannot simply say that his father was guilty but still loved.

Instead, he tries to excuse or reinterpret him. This makes his conversation with Anton explosive.

Fake shows that children inherit the moral wreckage of their parents’ choices, even when they themselves were powerless. His anger is ugly, but it is also rooted in abandonment, humiliation, and grief.

Mr. Korteweg

Mr. Korteweg is one of the story’s most troubling figures because his single action changes everything. He moves Ploeg’s body from his own house to the Steenwijks’ house, causing the fatal reprisal against Anton’s family.

For much of the book, he appears cowardly and selfish. The final revelation complicates this judgment.

He avoided placing the body before the Aartses’ house because they were hiding Jews, which means his action also protected hidden lives. At the same time, Karin reveals that he was deeply concerned about his lizards, which had become an obsessive reason for living.

His motives are therefore mixed: fear, moral awareness, attachment, panic, and self-preservation all meet in one act. His later suicide does not erase his responsibility, but it shows that he could not live with what he had done.

Mr. Korteweg represents the terrible scale of choices made under terror, where even a decision made in seconds can carry lifelong guilt.

Karin Korteweg

By the end of The Assault, Karin Korteweg becomes the final bearer of hidden truth. As a young woman, she is warm enough for Anton to remember her with adolescent attraction, but she is also trapped under her father’s authority.

On the night of the assault, she helps move the body and later watches Peter enter her house with the gun. Her adult meeting with Anton shows a woman who has lived for decades under the weight of that night.

She never marries or has children, suggesting a life narrowed by guilt and exile. Her account is essential because it completes the chain of cause and consequence: Peter’s death, her father’s fear, the move to New Zealand, the suicide, the lizards, and the hidden Jews next door.

Karin does not ask to be absolved, but she needs Anton to know. Her character shows how witnesses can also become prisoners of memory, especially when silence is imposed on them.

Saskia De Graaff

Saskia is Anton’s first wife and the mother of Sandra. She enters Anton’s life through instant recognition, though he only later understands that her appearance may have connected unconsciously with his hidden memory of Truus.

Saskia is not merely a substitute image, however. She is intelligent, socially graceful, and shaped by her own family’s wartime background.

Her father’s Resistance past gives her a certain discipline about not pressing people too hard about trauma. This restraint allows Anton to remain silent, but it also creates distance between them.

Saskia senses when something is wrong, especially after Anton meets Takes, yet she cannot fully enter the sealed chamber of his past. Their marriage eventually ends, but their continuing closeness suggests that the bond was real.

Saskia’s role highlights how trauma can affect love indirectly, through attraction, silence, projection, and the difficulty of being fully seen.

De Graaff

Godfried De Graaff, Saskia’s father, is a former Resistance leader, diplomat, and strong public personality. He represents the organized, official side of wartime resistance and postwar authority.

He is witty, combative, proud, and comfortable in political argument. At the funeral where Anton meets Takes, De Graaff’s exchanges with former Resistance associates reveal the divisions that emerged after the war: anti-Communism, loyalty to monarchy, debates over Vietnam, Indonesia, and the legacy of resistance.

He tells Anton that even good actions have an evil side, a statement that echoes through the novel’s moral structure. De Graaff’s strength lies in his ability to function publicly after the war, but he too believes in suppression and control.

He tells Anton that memories must be kept under control because delayed effects can surface decades later. His character shows how the war generation survived partly through discipline, irony, and political certainty.

Liesbeth

Liesbeth, Anton’s second wife, belongs to a later stage of his life, when he appears more settled and prosperous. She is connected to art history and to another history of wartime suffering through her father, who endured Japanese captivity and forced labor.

Like Anton, her father does not speak much about his experiences, which places Liesbeth within a broader pattern of silence across different wartime histories. Liesbeth’s role is quieter than Saskia’s, but she is important because she belongs to Anton’s attempt at a second life.

She is present during his anxiety attack in Tuscany and responds practically by calling a doctor. Her presence shows that Anton has built a new household, had another child, and achieved stability, yet even this life cannot fully free him from the past.

Through Liesbeth, the story shows that trauma can remain active beneath comfort, marriage, property, and middle age.

Sandra

Sandra is Anton and Saskia’s daughter, and she represents the generation after the war. As a child at the funeral, she asks simple questions about death and war, forcing adults to translate vast historical violence into language a child can understand.

Later, as a teenager, she asks to see where Anton’s family died. Her response to Truus is morally direct: she initially sees Truus as part of the cause of the disaster.

Anton’s answer to her shows how much his understanding has changed. Sandra is not burdened by memory in the same way Anton is, but she inherits the need to ask.

Her pregnancy near the end of the story also places her within the movement of life beyond catastrophe. Through Sandra, the book contrasts lived memory with inherited memory and shows how the past must be explained to those born after it.

Anton’s Son Peter

Anton’s son Peter carries the name of Anton’s dead brother, making him a living link between past and future. He belongs entirely to the postwar generation, yet his name ties him to a boy killed before he could grow up.

At the anti-nuclear demonstration, Anton is moved by Peter’s presence in the crowd. When Anton takes Peter’s hand near the end, the gesture joins memory, fatherhood, and survival.

This Peter is not a replacement for the dead Peter, but his existence shows that life has continued beyond the night of destruction. He also allows Anton to occupy a role that was taken from his own father: the role of a parent walking beside a son.

His character is not developed through extensive action, but symbolically he is vital to the final image of continuity.

Schulz

Schulz is a German sergeant who briefly treats Anton with kindness after the destruction of his family. He gives Anton food, warm clothing, and practical protection, then dies during the convoy attack.

His presence complicates Anton’s childhood understanding of enemy and ally. The same occupying system murders Anton’s family, yet one German soldier helps him.

Schulz does not cancel the crimes of the occupation, but he prevents Anton’s memory from becoming morally simple. Anton’s guilt after Schulz’s death is irrational but psychologically revealing.

He feels responsible because trauma often attaches guilt to survival itself. Schulz shows how individual decency can appear inside a violent system without redeeming that system.

His brief role adds to the book’s refusal to let history settle into easy categories.

Mrs. Beumer

Mrs. Beumer is the neighbor who reconnects Anton to Haarlem when he returns as a young man. Her home becomes the first place where he hears local memory spoken aloud after years of avoidance.

She remembers the Steenwijk family, the night of the assault, and the memorial. Her talkativeness nearly overwhelms Anton, especially when she describes what his parents must have suffered.

Yet she is not cruel; she is an ordinary survivor who has kept memory alive in a way Anton has not. Her husband’s belief that they were spared by God introduces another attempt to explain arbitrary survival.

Mrs. Beumer’s role is to show how places preserve stories even when those most affected refuse to return to them. Through her, Anton is pushed toward the monument and toward the first cracks in his controlled forgetting.

Themes

Guilt Without Clear Boundaries

In The Assault, guilt does not remain attached to one person or one act. It spreads across the Resistance fighters who kill Ploeg, the Germans who execute hostages, the Kortewegs who move the body, Peter who takes the gun, and even Anton, who survives and feels responsible for things he did not cause.

The book refuses to give the reader a single guilty figure who explains everything. Ploeg is guilty of cruelty and collaboration.

The Germans are guilty of murder and reprisal. Mr. Korteweg is guilty of moving the body, yet he also saves Jews by not placing it before the Aartses’ house.

Takes kills Ploeg to stop a dangerous man, but the killing leads to innocent deaths. Anton’s final question is whether everyone is both guilty and not guilty.

This theme is powerful because it shows that moral judgment in wartime may be necessary but still incomplete. People act under fear, loyalty, ignorance, and pressure, and their choices create results they cannot foresee.

The novel does not excuse evil, but it shows how responsibility can become painfully complex when history enters private life.

Memory, Avoidance, and Return

Anton spends much of his life trying not to remember, but forgetting in the book is never simple. He avoids documents, books, political arguments, and visits to Haarlem because he wants the past to remain sealed.

Yet memory returns through objects, places, voices, chance meetings, and bodily reactions. A dice, a stone, a mirror, a photograph, a toothache, a dark room, or a crowd can bring back what Anton has tried to bury.

His memory is also incomplete. He forgets being told about the memorial, cannot recall Truus’s words for decades, and carries impressions rather than full explanations.

The structure of the story mirrors this process: the truth arrives in pieces over many years. Anton does not solve the past like a detective; he receives it unwillingly, through encounters with people who hold missing fragments.

This theme shows that trauma can be inactive on the surface while still shaping a person’s choices. Memory may be delayed, distorted, or hidden, but it continues to wait for conditions that allow it to return.

The Cost of Resistance

Resistance in the story is necessary, but it is not presented as morally effortless. Ploeg is a brutal collaborator whose death can be defended, yet his assassination causes reprisals that destroy Anton’s family.

Truus and Takes act against evil, but both understand that fighting Fascism can push a person toward violent methods. Truus warns that one must not become too much like the enemy, while Takes admits that he has crossed lines and carries a harsh view of what resistance required.

The book respects the courage of those who fought the Nazis, but it also examines the burden of their choices. Takes can justify the assassination, yet he is not free from its emotional cost.

De Graaff and his old Resistance circle reveal how wartime alliances later fracture into political arguments. Resistance creates heroes, but it also creates survivors who must live with deaths, compromises, and memories that do not fit public monuments.

The theme asks readers to accept two truths at once: some violence may be used against greater violence, and even justified action can leave lasting damage.

Chance, Cause, and the Search for Meaning

The central event depends on a chain of accidents and decisions so fragile that it seems almost unbearable. Ploeg happens to be shot in one place rather than another.

The Kortewegs move the body. Peter tries to move it again.

The Germans arrive at a certain moment. The Aartses are hiding Jews.

Mr. Korteweg loves his lizards. Anton is taken away rather than killed.

Each fact changes the fate of many people. Anton’s life becomes a long encounter with causes he did not know existed.

At first, the assault seems like a single act of wartime cruelty. Later, it becomes a web of motives, fears, and hidden facts.

The book repeatedly asks whether understanding causes brings peace. Anton learns more and more, but the full truth is worse than the partial version.

Meaning exists, but it does not comfort him in any easy way. The final movement through the crowd suggests that history is made of countless human actions, many of them half-known, and that life continues even when complete justice or complete understanding remains impossible.