Marga Minco

Biography

Marga Minco (b. 1920) grew up in a Jewish family of five in Breda. Unlike her sister, brother and parents, she escaped being arrested and went into hiding during World War II. In 1957 she made her literary debut with the short novel Het bittere kruid (Bitter Herbs), the laconic and devastating story of a young girl who gets away when her parents are arrested, and finally discovers that she has lost everyone who was close to her. The book was a great success both in the Netherlands (more than 400,000 copies sold) and abroad. New work followed at irregular intervals: De andere kant (The Other Side, 1959), Een leeg huis (An Empty House, 1966), De val (The Fall, 1983) and De glazen brug (The Glass Bridge, 1986). Minco lives and works in Amsterdam.

Titles

Bitter Herbs

(Het bittere kruid, 1957)

Marga Minco is the only member of her immediate family to have survived the Second World War. Her father, mother, brother Dave and his fiancée, her sister Bettie and husband – all were deported to concentration camps. None returned.

Minco’s entire oeuvre is informed by these dreadful, incredible facts. She once said in an interview, ‘Whether I want to or not, I always return to 1940-45. Those were the years that made the most impression on me.’ The inability to let go of the past is undeniably the overarching theme in Marga Minco’s work. Continued...

The Fall

(De Val, 1983)

Frieda Borgstein’s husband and two children, all dead, are constantly on her mind. A friend had promised the Borgstein family safe conduct to Switzerland. At the last moment Frieda goes upstairs for a warm sweater, trips and falls. She hears her husband and children being picked up below, not by the friend but by the Nazis. They die in a concentration camp; Frieda survives, convinced that their friend betrayed them. In the novel, she is eighty-four and living in an old people’s home. She goes into town to buy pastries from the baker for her birthday the next day. Continued...

The Days They Left Behind

(Nagelaten dagen, 1997)

In Dutch literature no author is as closely associated with the process of coming to terms with World War II as Marga Minco. Throughout her meticulous and scintillating oeuvre she uses an almost unemotional tone to describe the gruesome fate suffered by Jews who went into hiding. Continued...