The Assault: Fourth Episode: 1966, Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

Cor and Anton make plans to see each other the next day. Anton goes to Cor’s house after work, and when Cor opens the door Anton can see that he has been drinking. Inside Cor’s apartment, Anton cannot believe the mess. Cor asks Anton if he has read the paper yet and shows him an article saying that Willy Lages, the head of the Gestapo in the Netherlands, is appealing for release from prison due to illness. Cor is furious, expressing that he’d like to slit Lages’s throat himself.

Cor knows that Anton is a doctor because he called De Graaff to Anton’s information. Anton asks about Cor’s life, and Cor says that he was a mathematician before the war. During the war, he worked at an “anatomical institute” where they would execute traitors of the resistance. Cor leads Anton to a basement, where there is a wrecked bicycle and an annotated map of Germany on the wall. Anton looks closer and sees a woman’s lipstick print on the map. He realizes it must be Truus’s. Anton sits next to Cor in the dank room, having “never felt so intimate with another man.”

Suddenly, Anton notices a photograph of a woman on the wall. He is struck by the woman’s resemblance to Saskia, though the resemblance is only in the expression in her eyes. Cor asks if the woman in the photograph is the woman Anton met in the cell, and Anton says it must be. Cor begins to get frantic, begging Anton to tell him what she said to him in the cell. Anton does not remember anything she said—only that she was bleeding and told a long story. When Cor learns what police station they were in, he remarks that they could have gotten her out.

Cor tells Anton more about his relationship with Truus: he was married with children at the time. Though he would have left his family for Truus, she did not believe he truly loved her, and she would not commit to being with him. Cor says that he and Truus used to talk for hours about morality. For example, Cor once asked Truus what she would do if a Nazi held both her parents at gunpoint and told her to choose which one he should shoot. If she refused to choose, the Nazi would shoot both of them. Truus answered that she wouldn’t tell him anything, because if she said anything then it would have been her choice to kill one of her parents. Cor also tells Anton an anecdote about Truus getting lost in the dark before realizing when the day dawned that she was right next to her house.

Cor and Truus disagreed on revolutionary methods: Cor believed that you must fight Fascists with Fascism, while Truus believed that becoming a Fascist would mean the Fascists win. Cor describes Truus as “a philosopher with a gun,” and he takes out Truus’s gun to show Cor. It is the gun with which Ploeg was killed. Cor tells Anton more details about the shooting. Anton realizes that the scream he heard that night was not Ploeg’s: it was Cor’s after Ploeg shot Truus.

Cor tells Anton that he fantasizes about shooting the woman who told the police where he and Truus were hiding. Cor tells Anton about a film he saw in which a man seeks revenge on the man who raped and murdered his daughter, but he decides not to kill him in the end because he realizes the man is a victim of circumstances. Cor, however, disagrees with this idea, saying that if one subscribes to that logic, then “all those who have lived under unfortunate conditions are potential rapists and murderers.”

Cor goes to take a phone call. Anton sits in the basement alone, despairing over the misery in the world: “even if we had heaven on earth tomorrow, it couldn’t be perfect because of all that’s happened,” he muses to himself. Suddenly, the ashtray catches fire. Anton puts out the fire and goes upstairs to find Cor standing and staring. Cor tells him that one of the men from the funeral the previous day died by suicide—he’d vowed that if Lages ever get let out of jail, he would shoot himself. Anton and Cor stand together in silence.