Actions, no matter how much they may be/seem to be necessary to the perpertrator, often have terrible consequences for others that may outweigh the anticipated benefits.

Brilliant long novella, spare but evocative, driven along by a wartime assault whose circumstances gradually and laconically unravel over a lifetime.

xx Mulisch, who died in 2010, has long been regarded as the Netherlands' greatest postwar novelist. With the narrative sureness of Graham Greene and the plausibility of a William Trevor plot, his special area (resulting from his own, very troubling parentage) is the tensions between collaboration and resistance during the Hitler War. xx Going on this short novel, he's an author well worth exploring.