Marga Minco was a young adult when the Nazis invaded the Netherlands and she would lose her entire family in the ensuing Holocaust. She wrote pieces of this novel as short stories about her experiences, and in 1957 she put the stories in chronological order and published them as a novel. The book became very popular and acclaimed and was required reading in many schools in the Netherlands. In the novel she is roughly six years younger than she was in real life, but the incidents are based on her life.

Although told in a spare style without excess emotion, I found Bitter Herbs quite touching. The story of her and her brother going to various stores looking for good camping cups to take with them will remain with me. ( )

Marga Minco is one of the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust whose writing strikes a cord. Much of the power of her stories lies in what is not said, or, in the case of Het bittere kruid. Een kleine kroniek, widely considered her masterwork, in the simple observations of a child, without the insight or explanation of the adult writer. This short novel tells the story of survival in hiding. ( )

This very sober and pared-down novella tells the story of a young Jewish girl's experiences during the German occupation of the Netherlands, in the simplest possible language and with the least possible explicit emotional input. It's the kind of book that has all its narrative power in the things it doesn't tell us, but which we know are there just under the surface. By not sharing anything about the narrator's fears and griefs, it takes us into them much more strongly than it would if everything had been spelled out.

The story is a lightly fictionalised version of Minco's own experiences — all her family were murdered in the Holocaust, but she was able to escape arrest by a stroke of luck and remained in hiding until the end of the war. She sharpens the focus a bit by making her narrator seem rather younger and more naive than she actually was herself (in reality she was already working as a journalist in May 1940). But it would be unfair to suggest that she was trying to ride in the slipstream of Anne Frank (although her publishers certainly were): this is a very different kind of book, clearly a highly sophisticated piece of literature with a strong message about the gulf that opened up under the ordinary, provincial life the Minco family and their neighbours were living, convinced that "it can't happen here," when it did. ( )

Hollandia, második világháború, holokauszt. A RaRe-köteteknél hiányolni szoktam az utószót, de itt, meg kell hagyni, valóban nincs szükség rá. A fenti négy szó épp elegendő kontextust teremt ahhoz, hogy értsük és érezzük, mi történik. (Már ha megvannak hozzá a megfelelő szerveink.) Mert azok, akik átélték, még ennyit sem tudtak, ezért is igyekeztek beilleszteni a normalitásba, a hétköznapi élet keretei közé azt, ami felfoghatatlan és beilleszthetetlen. Minco elképesztően szűkszavú prózája kevés szóval is tökéletesen érzékelteti ezt a hiábavaló (és önpusztító) igyekezetet – az az epizód a sárga csillagokkal például a legjobb jelenetek egyike, amit valaha a holokausztról írtak. Pedig hát – milyen köznapi. Milyen triviális. De pont ez a lényeg: hogy itt csak mellékesen van szó zsidókról. Itt valójában köznapi emberekről beszélünk. Szerintem ezt kell megérteni.

Lapszéli jegyzet önmagamnak: szóba ne hozd Anne Frankot! ( )

http://occamsrazorlibrary.blogspot.com/2008/01/bitter-herb.html ( )