Marga Minco (1920–2023)

Marga Minco, née Sara Minco, was born to a Jewish family in Ginneken, The Netherlands. Her parents were Grietje (van Hoorn) and Salomon Minco, a salesman. She had a sister, Bettie, and a brother, David. The family moved to Breda in about 1925. Ms. Minco began writing as a child, and following her graduation from high school, got a job as an apprentice reporter for the Bredasche Courant, where she covered local news and wrote theater and film reviews. After Nazi Germany invaded Holland in World War II in May 1940, Ms. Minco was fired from her job and her family was forced into a Jewish ghetto in Amsterdam. Her parents and both siblings were rounded up and deported by the Nazis. Ms. Minco escaped and went into hiding with her boyfriend Bert Voeten, a poet and translator, and assumed the alias Marga. After the liberation of The Netherlands, Ms. Minco learned that she was the only surviving member of her extended family except for an uncle. Ms. Minco and Voeten married in August 1945 and had two daughters. In 1957, she made her literary debut with a short novel in diary form that remains her best-known work, Het bittere kruid (Bitter Herbs). She took Marga Minco as her pen name. Bitter Herbs was one of the first books about the war and the Holocaust published in The Netherlands, and became a bestseller that has never gone out of print. Besides novels, Ms. Minco also wrote numerous short stories that appeared in Dutch periodicals and were later published in collections such as De andere kant (The Other Side, 1959), Het adres en andere verhalen (The Address and Other Stories, 1976), and Achter de muur (Behind the Wall, 2010). Although she wrote about many other subjects, at times with absurdist and humorous elements, Ms. Minco always returned to her experiences during WWII and the post-war period. She received many awards for individual works, as well as the 1999 Annie Romein Prize, the 2005 Constantijn Huygens Prize, and the 2018 P.C. Hooft Prize, her country's most prestigious literary award, for her entire oeuvre.