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What distinguishes Keilson from other writers on the Nazi era is his uncanny understanding of the persecutor as well as the persecuted. He realizes that the terrorist is vulnerable as well as brutal. He tenderly describes a nocturnal raid on a minority cemetery by young party recruits : their initiation into Nazi-type brutality. Scared and disgusted, one starts to stutter, another has an attack of diarrhea, a third gouges his eye. An orphan, reminded of his parents' grave, tears up the cemetery more ferociously than anyone else, "as though he wanted to scratch the buried bones out of the ground."
Keilson's novel is, at least in part, autobiographical. Like his hero, Keilson joined the Resistance after years of anguish, helped Jews and downed pilots escape from occupied Holland. In 1942 he wrote the first 40 pages of The Death of the Adversary, buried them in his garden for the duration of the war. "If ever I came out of this war alive," he vowed, "I knew I was going to be a psychiatrist." Today he is a practicing psychoanalyst in Amsterdam and writes poetry and fiction on the side. "Everybody writes novels about love and/or sex," he says. "My book is about the phenomenon of hate."