In the winter of 1945 during the last days of the Nazi occupation of Holland, a Nazi collaborator is assassinated.

In retaliation, the Germans execute the adults in a Dutch family but eventually deliver one 12 year old son to safety. The Assault traces the lifelong repercussions of this event on Anton's life. It examines his attempts to forget and the strange periodic "episodes," little chance events, that continue to force the memory to surface long enough to become complete enough that he, as an aging adult, can finally effect closure and true "forgetting."