Harry Kurt Victor Mulisch was born on 29 July 1927 in Haarlem in the Netherlands. 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 raised largely by his parents' housemaid, Frieda Falk. Mulisch said of himself, he did not just write about World War II, he was WWII.