![marga minco marga minco](https://media.s-bol.com/OYYL2G28W4mp/664x1200.jpg)
After returning to Amsterdam and various other locations after the liberation of the Netherlands, the experiences and emotions she evokes in her novels and stories, including The Address (1957) and An Empty House (1966), can be compared to those of concentration camp survivors: social isolation, self-alienation amid indifferent - even hostile - surroundings, and survivor’s guilt. Her prose also occupies a special position in Dutch and European Shoah literature, because Minco is one of the few Dutch Jews who were able to escape deportation. Stylising memories and using imagination and symbolism as an important structural feature would later be considered some of the main characteristics of Minco’s oeuvre. She turned out to be the only Holocaust survivor, except for one of her uncles. This technique is typical of the literary approach characterizing the post-war reconstruction of Minco’s family history. The age difference with the heroine in Bitter Herbs underlines the child’s perspective, which sheds light on the innocence and the unpredictably of the Jews’ fate. In fact, she was a twenty-year-old journalist for the Bredasche Courant and her story of the persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands is not a first-person text in a narrow sense, but rather a subtle and complex literary work, permeated with allusions to Jewish culture. Even though Bitter Herbs is largely based on autobiographical experiences, the author was by no means similar to “little Marga” when the war broke out. However, he did not pay attention to the literary dimension of Minco’s ‘little’ war chronicle. In 1960, renowned psychiatrist Bruno Bettelheim published his essay The Ignored Lesson of Anne Frank, in which he criticised Frank’s father Otto’s choice, who allegedly put his family in danger by hiding in the secret annex instead of offering his children the chance to take refuge at the right time, similar to what Bitter Herbs’ first-person narrator’s father does by leaving the door to the garden ajar for his daughter.īettelheim also drew more attention to Minco’s testimony by stating that “the story of little Marga who survived remains totally neglected by comparison”. However, Minco’s modest oeuvre (five short novels, a sizeable volume entitled Collected Stories and a few children’s books) never completely dropped off the radar: her best-known novel, Bitter Herbs (1957), has thus far gone into its fifty-ninth edition.īecause of the success of Bitter Herbs, which would forever be associated with Minco by mainstream audiences, the author was frequently compared to some kind of Anne Frank, but one who did survive going into hiding. Hooft Award for narrative prose, a well-deserved recognition although it came remarkably late. About a year ago, Marga Minco was presented with the P.C.