Life
Mulisch was born in Haarlem and lived in Amsterdam from 1958, following the death of his father in 1957, until the end of his own life. Mulisch's father was from Austria-Hungary and emigrated to the Netherlands after the First World War. During the German occupation in World War II his father worked for a German bank, which also dealt with confiscated Jewish assets. His mother, Alice Schwarz, was Jewish. Mulisch and his mother escaped transportation to a concentration camp thanks to Mulisch's father's collaboration with the Nazis, but his maternal grandmother died in a gas chamber. Mulisch was mostly raised by his parents' housemaid, Frieda Falk. Mulisch said of himself, he did not just write about World War II, he was WWII.
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