(Bert Bakker, 1957, 90 pages)

Marga Minco is the only member of her immediate family to have survived the Second World War. Her mother and father, her brother and his fiancée, her sister and her sister’s husband were all deported to concentration camps. Her entire body of work is informed by these facts. ‘Whether I want to or not, I always return to 1940 – 45. Those were the years that made the most impression on me.’ This inability to let go of the past is the undeniable, overarching theme of Marga Minco’s work.

(Bert Bakker, 1983, 92 pages)

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.

(Bert Bakker, 1997, 120 pages)

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.