The Assault

The Assault

At the tail end of World War II, in Nazi-occupied Holland, “The Assault” begins. A Dutch collaborator is shot dead by partisans on a quiet suburban street. The terrified neighbors peer into the night behind their curtains, expecting terrible Nazi reprisals. Shadowy figures come out of the dark and drag the body to the front of the house next door; then the rest of Anton Steenwijk’s life he was a young boy who lived in that house becomes this movie.

His family is taken away by the Nazis. They all vanish except for him; apparently they were all liquidated, and he survives through a series of bureaucratic oversights and lucky breaks. Afterward, he goes to college, gets married and succeeds in his profession; but always there hangs over his life what happened on that awful night.

But two other families are also scarred by the assault. One is that of the murdered Nazi collaborator: Some years later Anton (Derek De Lint) runs into his son and we find that dad’s political choice has made him an embittered young right-winger who grew up as an outcast and menial laborer scorned after the war.

Still later, at a ’60s ban-the-bomb parade, Anton sees again and learns why her father dragged it there the woman who lived next door on that night when her daddy dragged the dead man to its front so another family would be punished by Nazis. He had his reasons. Maybe they were good ones.

Of course not good enough if you lost your whole family because of them.

“Assault” is like a fictional footnote to “Shoah,” Claude Lanzmann’s great documentary that asked unanswerable questions about guilt and blame in regard to Holocaust atrocities; it is also a little like “Rashomon,” Akira Kurosawa’s film which looked at the same crime from a number of different angles and found many different truths.

Something terrible happened on that night. Lives were wrecked. Each survivor had to deal with guilt in his or her own way. Even Anton had guilt, because he alone was spared when all the rest of his family was murdered. The film’s truest and most painful moment comes some 20 years after the assault itself. Anton happily married, father, successful, content is suddenly visited by a great ballooning emptiness.

To call it depression would be an understatement. He is overwhelmed by an awful truth: that absolute injustice exists in our world, that evil is real, that death is permanent. In some sense this picture is about how he manages to go on with his life after coming face-to-face with these facts.

Although “Assault” (one of this year’s nominees for best foreign film Oscar) asks important questions and never flinches from examining them directly, it could have been more effective than it finally turns out to be. The picture spans almost 40 years; that may be its strength but paradoxically also what keeps it from being stronger still. Its power lies in showing how one night of tragedy reverberates through time, blighting many lives over decades later on.

Multiply this assault by a million others, and you’ll have some idea of how much destruction the war has caused.

But in covering so many lives for so many years, the movie also loses some energy and focus. The canvas is too broad.

What I remember best are the small moments, one in particular: Anton is comforted in a jail cell by the young woman partisan who killed his family on the night of the attack. Years later, he gets to meet her partner through a coincidence and tells him that she was in love with him something he’d never known before when the man is old and sick.

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