(Passage on page 35)

The very first thought that I recognized on the page was the motif of light and dark. Light usually symbolizes some sort of hope or something greater in life, whereas dark symbolizes anger or a force of evil. The setting of this passage is when Anton is in a jail cell with an unnamed woman, who we later find out to be a terrorist. She is lecturing him as she holds onto him in the cot, "Tonight there is no moon, and yet it was very bright, but that time it was cloudy and there was no snow yet.' (Mulisch 35). The underlying message in this quotation ignited a thought in my mind that related back to the shooting of Fake Pleoge. If she said it was very bright, wouldn't Anton and his family have been able to see who shot Fake? Wouldn't they be able to see where Peter ran off to before the Nazis stormed there home? Yet the shooting was not what the woman was talking about. She was discussing her visual memory of her neighborhood as she walked home in the dark one night. She knew the location of every bush and telephone pole in her neighborhood, yet she was lost. It was dark that night, dark again symbolizing some for of evil or bad to come. Now this woman is in a jail cell, I can only infer that the darkness of that night foreshadowed her ending up in the jail. Also why I can infer this is due to the lack of light that night, or the lack of hope which is what light symbolizes. Since The Assualt by Harry Mulisch is a book about Jewish people and the Holocaust, this motif creates what I believe to be a greater theme for the book. Light and dark are opposites of each other, like a Nazi and a Jew, they coexist together, but when mixed very bad results consume them, just like the results of the Holocaust.