While The Assault is an exemplar of many of the elements which may be found in fiction of the occupation, it is by no means the only text of its kind. Having described and delineated many of these elements in the previous chapter, I will now proceed to consider the child as a protagonist. It will become evident that the narrative structures and features found in The Assault are not unique to Mulisch's novel, but also occur in other narratives which engage the post-war consequences of the experience of the occupation by young people. While it may be tempting to view Marga Minco’s The Glass Bridge and Rudi van Dantzig's For a Lost Soldier superficially as variations or even as derivative in some way of The Assault, each of them serves to widen and deepen the discourse in its own way. Themes and images of children during wartime belong to the fund of culturally mediated memories in which such novels participate, even as they in turn contribute to the discussion about the effects of the occupation.

While Marga Minco's De glazen brug, published in 1986, shows striking thematic similarities to The Assault, any discussion of the text or its context must begin with one major difference – that of viewing the memory of the occupation from the perspective of Jewish subjects. In some sense, nearly all of Minco's works from 1957 to the present deal thematically with the occupation and its consequences for post-war life. Minco's novels as a group might themselves be the basis for an inquiry into how some of the issues discussed in this study are reflected as cultural discourse in ways which change with the point in history at which each of the novels is published, and the time periods in which each of the texts is set.

Seen from within the context of Minco's own writings, The Glass Bridge is an interesting case when one compares it with one of her own pre-1980s texts. Her 1957 novel Het bittere kruid (Bitter Herbs), like the later work, also tells the tale of a young Jewish woman who escapes as her entire family is arrested by the Nazis and deported to concentration camps.