Light: Exists where there is Love, and Used to Defeat

In the passage on page 38, Anton listens to an unnamed woman speak to him about light and its relation to their lives in the present. There is evidence throughout the passage that light is being personified. For example, the line "...light you sometimes see clinging to trees right after sunset: the magical sort of light." (Mulisch, 38) demonstrates personification. Also, the unknown woman spoke of how light lives in people enamored with another. The way she speaks about light and its goodness makes the reader wonder why she keeps going on about love, and I feel that this could possibly be foreshadowing some deeper meaning involving her and her love in another part of this novel. In fact, the passage itself can be seen as being spoken by someone in quite a distant, enchanted, distracted-by-love kind of way. The woman's diction (i.e. "magical") justifies her tone. Through hearing what she spoke of and how she spoke of it, the light within the woman herself is expressed.
Another significant part of this passage was how, in a sense, one must lose themselves to defeat the thing that goes against what they stand for. In this case, it was ironic how it was described that "We've got to become a little bit like them to fight them.."(Mulisch, 38). The juxtaposition of light and dark evoked meaning through explaining how stark the differences were between the mindsets and values of the Nazis and everyone else at the time. It was an interesting point, and I think that this as well as other supporting points in the novel can help amount to the thematic conclusion of Nazi Europe being a place where identities of the repressed were manipulated and lost.