Word: anton
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Based on Dutch author Harry Mulisch's novel, The Assault is the story of a Dutch man's coming to grips with history and his own past. As a 12-year-old boy in early 1945, Anton Steenwijk (Marc van Uchelen) lives under the shadow of the Nazi occupation of Haarlem. Despite the food and fuel shortages, the almost-defeated Nazis have a minimal effect on the lives of the Steenwijk family, who try to evade history by translating Homer, reading Spinoza, and playing board games...
...Anton's illusions are shattered when a Nazi collaborator is assassinated in front of the house next door, and the neighbors move the body in front of the Steenwijk house to avoid the Nazis' wrath. Within the hour, in fact, the Nazis have burned down Anton's house, slaughtered his family, and thrown him in jail...
...dark cell, Anton meets a woman from the Resistance who has been wounded. She kisses his forehead to comfort him, unwittingly smearing him with blood and lipstick. Anton is released the next day to his surviving relatives in Amsterdam, but in a sense, he never completely washes away the blood and lipstick, as hard as he tries...
...ballerina turned budget analyst. Diversity is the rule. Eric Gaidos plots schemes for the exploration of Mars at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. Martha McSally, a biology major and triathlete, helps oversee basic training at the U.S. Air Force Academy. And there is William Anton, who, when not earning straight A's at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, is in the ring training for a shot at the U.S. Olympic boxing team...
...Anton (who is portrayed as an adult by a wonderfully wary actor named Derek de Lint) keeps running into other witnesses to the assault and its aftermath: the underground fighter who was one of the assassins; the woman who helped move the murdered man's body; even the son of the victim. Indeed, Anton, without seeming quite aware of what he is doing, marries a woman who looks like the Resistance heroine with whom he shared a cell on the night of the assault and who, it is revealed, also participated in it (both are played, with a spirit that...