The Assault

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.

Anton Steenwijk

The quay in Haarlem

First Episode, 1945

The book opens here on a winter evening near the end of the war, with a boy and his family in one of a handful of houses strung along the water. A collaborator is shot in the road nearby, the body ends up before their door, and the German reprisal takes everything but the boy. Every later chapter reaches back to this stretch of quay.

First Episode

inferred Mulisch sets the opening on a quay on the edge of Haarlem, a short row of houses beside the water, but gives it no real street name; this marks a representative quayside along the Spaarne, the river that runs through the city where the author grew up.

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Anton Steenwijk

Grote Markt, Haarlem

First Episode, 1945

The old market square is the heart of the Haarlem the boy is torn out of that night and keeps circling back to across his life. Around the great church and the town hall, the city that the story treats as home stands more or less unchanged, a fixed point against the decades that follow.

First Episode

explicit Haarlem is named throughout; the Grote Markt is the historic centre of the city the novel returns to, marked at the square itself.

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