Writer Marga Minco died on Monday, July 10 at the age of 103, according to an obituary her family placed in NRC. She is buried privately. Minco was best known for her book The bitter herb, which appeared in 1957.
Minco was born as Sara Menco on March 31, 1920 in Ginneken en Bavel (North Brabant) and died in Amsterdam. She was married to poet Bert Voeten, who died in 1992.
The ad read: “Our wonderful, sweet, witty, special, indestructible mother has passed away.”
Minco sometimes made a careful attempt to get rid of the label ‘war writer’. “I don’t write as a victim, I write.” If she was very honest, however, the writer, who grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family, could not ignore it: the fate of the Jews during and after the Second World War was her theme. Minco already established her name as a ‘war writer’ with her debut The bitter herb (1957). In this ‘little chronicle’, as she called it herself to emphasize that it all really happened, she describes how she narrowly escaped deportation in May 1943. Minco sneaks out of her house on Sarphatistraat in Amsterdam through a garden gate and is the only member of the family to survive the war.
The garden gate through which she escaped the Germans may have sown the seeds of her writing, but she wrote about the fate of the Jews even before the war. On the fifth day of the occupation, as a reporter for the Bredasche Courant, she noticed what it was like to be Jewish under German rule: she was told in the newspaper that she was no longer welcome as a Jew.
After the war, she resumed her journalistic work and continued writing. A daily activity for Minco, although she published only sparingly: apart from the stories, which were bundled in 1982, a number of novellas and a thin novel, An Empty House, appeared in 1966. In it she wrote about the struggle of the survivors with their past.
The appearance of the novella De val, in 1983, came as a surprise because Minco had not been heard from for a long time. This was followed by, among other things, the book week gift The glass bridge (1986) and the small novel Nalatendagen (1997). In September 2004 she was in the bookshops for the last time with a new book: the short story collection Storing.
Minco received the PC Hooftprijs 2019 for her entire ouevre. She previously received the Annie Romein Prize (1999) and the Constantijn Huygens Prize (2005). For Het bitterekruid she received the Vijverberg Prize, predecessor of the F. Bordewijk Prize.