The Assault

This film unfolds as a tightly structured meditation on memory, told through a brief prologue and five episodes dated 1945, 1952, 1956, 1966, and 1981. It centers on twelve-year-old Anton Steenwijk, who lives with his parents and older brother on the outskirts of Haarlem during the Nazi Occupation in January 1945. One evening, after hearing shots, they witness the aftermath of a brutal act: Fake Ploeg, a prominent Dutch collaborator, has been assassinated. In the chaotic hours that follow, the Steenwijks’ neighbors, the Kortewegs, move the body from its original site in front of the Steenwijks’ house to a position in front of their own. In the ensuing violence, Anton’s family is killed and their house is set ablaze, while he spends a night in a dark police station cell in Heemstede, comforted by an unseen young woman prisoner. As the convoy proceeds toward Amsterdam, a German soldier dies protecting him when the convoy comes under air attack, and Anton is placed in the care of an aunt and uncle in the city.

All the rest is postscript–the cloud of ash that rises from the volcano, circles around the earth, and continues to rain down on all its continents for years.

In the decades that follow, Anton grows into an anesthesiologist, marries twice, and has a child with each wife. He carries the weight of repressed memories and a limited understanding of what happened that night, never fully grasping the diverse motives that night’s events may have reflected. Instead of actively chasing witnesses, he stumbles upon crucial details through chance encounters, leaving him with riddles rather than neat resolutions. He weighs the various motives, consequences, and ethical judgments—pondering how much of what occurred was intentional, and how much was the result of accident. His personal history unfolds against a shifting Dutch society, where the Cold War, anti-establishment protests, and large anti-nuclear demonstrations form a tense backdrop.

In Haarlem, 1952, Anton returns for a party and visits the Beumers, reconnecting with the town’s memory and the monument dedicated to his parents and the others who died that night. A few years later, he encounters Fake Ploeg’s son, who bears his father’s name, and the two occupy starkly different paths: the orphan who pursued medicine and the son of a collaborator who repairs water heaters. Their exchange lays bare the moral rifts created by war and reprisal, as each man measures their shared loss against their diverging destinies.

We’re in the same class, your parents are shot, but you’re doing medical studies all the same, whereas my father was shot and I repair water heaters.

In 1966, at a funeral for an older man connected to his father-in-law’s circle, Anton overhears a discussion about a resistance action and realizes the subject is Ploeg’s assassination. He talks at length with Cor Takes, a steadfast critic of leniency toward collaborators, who argues for justice beyond mere aging or remorse. The two men exchange what they know—and what they don’t—about that fateful night, acknowledging how much remains uncertain even as they uncover more details about the plot and the identity of the woman who comforted Anton years earlier.

Finally, in 1981, as Anton nears grandfatherhood, he meets a neighbor who had moved Ploeg’s body in front of his house. This conversation reveals why the Kortewegs acted as they did that night and why they chose to direct the body toward the Steenwijks’ home, a revelation that ties together the moral questions that have haunted Anton for decades: the difference between what is right, what is possible, and what the passage of time can finally reveal about guilt, innocence, and the human cost of wartime choices.

The narrative is quiet in its tone but expansive in its implications, inviting readers to weigh intention against circumstance, memory against history, and the way small, seemingly random acts can echo across generations. It is as much a study of a single life under occupation as it is a broader meditation on a society emerging from war and confronting its own unresolved past.

Last Updated: October 01, 2025 at 10:24