Literary places in Haarlem

The Assault

Harry Mulisch

A single night on a Haarlem quay in the Hunger Winter of 1945 sets the whole book in motion: a collaborator shot in the dark, a family burned out and killed in reprisal, one boy left alive. The map holds Haarlem, where it happens, against the Amsterdam of the postwar decades, where the surviving child grows into a doctor and slowly learns what that night really was. The two cities sit about twenty kilometres apart across the North Holland flatland.

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