It covers 35 years in the life of the lone survivor of a night in Haarlem during World War II when the Nazi occupation forces, finding a Dutch collaborator murdered, retaliate by killing most of the family in front of whose home the body was found.

In the chaotic hours that follow, Anton's family is killed and their house torched, while he spends a night in a dark police station cell in Heemstede being comforted by an unseen young woman prisoner.

He weighs motivations and unintended consequences, the moral judgments made and risks taken, the interplay of intention and accident, the actions he and his brother and parents took or failed to take.

He speaks at length with this man, Cor Takes, one of those for whom the battle against fascism is very much alive, who opposes commuting the sentences of collaborators just because they have become old and infirm: "'Just hand him to me and I'll split his throat.

In the Netherlands the novel's sale of 200,000 copies made it a "runaway success" even as it addressed the ongoing problem of reconciling the nation to its past, including its record of collaboration with its German occupiers.

[7] The novel received rave reviews in the U.S.[8] Though called a "political thriller"[1] for the way it slowly reveals its secrets, another critic described it as "the story of a man of inaction; his inner voice does not repeat 'lest we forget,' but 'lest we remember.

'"[9] Another called it "a detective story, of the superior Simenon variety, with intriguing twists and turns and a definite solution.... also a morality tale..., a dark fable about design and accident, strength and weakness, and the ways in which guilt and innocence can overlap and intermingle."

He praised Mulisch for his "exceptional skill and imagination" in establishing characters and social settings", with "a hundred small touches sustain the effect of psychological truthfulness".

[10] In the New Yorker, John Updike called the novel "brilliant" and "a kind of detective story" that "combines the fascination of its swift, skillfully unfolded plot with that of a study on the [psychology of repressed memory".