Dutch writer
Marga Minco is the pseudonym of Sara Menco, a Dutch writer who lost her Jewish family during the war. Books like “Het bittere kruid” (1957, The bitter herb) and “Een leeg huis” (1966, An empty house) refer to the existential problems of Holocaust survivors, who returned to empty houses and wondered why they survived and so many beloved ones did not. Her other two canonical books of post war Dutch literature are “De val” (1983, The fall) and “Nagelaten dagen” (1997, Bequeathed days) dealt with the resistance she experienced when she still struggled with the past when the war was over. Her work is many times reprinted and translated in many languages.
Sara Menco, often called Selma, grew up in an orthodox Jewish family. She was the youngest of three children. At age 5 the family moved to Breda where her father got a prestigious position in the Jewish synagogue. She followed the Nutsschool for girls and had a talent for writing. At age 17 she published in her first story “Het gouden knikkertje” (1938, The golden marble) in Het Algemeen Handelsblad.
Menco studied for journalist (1938-1940) and met the journalist Bert Voeten in 1938 during a visit to the theatre. They worked for different local papers in Breda and got an affair. But soon after after the traumatic evacuation of Breda (12 May 1940, “the flight”) she lost her job because of Berufsverbote for Jewish journalists. In 1940 Menco wanted to marriage Voeten, but her parent were opposed to it and sent her mid 1940 to an aunt in Assen in the hope that she would forget Voeten. She stayed in different places, got a mild form of tuberculosis and was hospitalised for this in Utrecht en Amersfoort.
Autumn 1942 she reunited with her parents as the Dutch Jewish citizens were concentrated in the “Judenviertel” of Amsterdam. Here the Germans held Razzia’s (roundups) under the Jewish population. When her parents were caught at home (April 1943), she miraculously escaped via a garden port and managed to find the hiding place of her brother Dave who lived under a false name in Amsterdam with his wife Lotte. Her black hair was made blond and her name was changed in Fimkje Kooi by a town clerk in Tietjerksteradeel who gave her an new identity. Another identity she had during her underground years was that of Marga Faes. Her pen-name Marga Minco was a combination of Marga Faes and an error of a clerk who wrote her surname as Minco instead of Menco.
Again miraculously, she met her youth friend Bert Voeten again on a shelter place early 1944 in the house of a “pottenbakker” (potter, ceramist) in Heemstede. In December 1944 they got an illegal daughter Bettie at their shelter place at the Kloveniersburgwal in Amsterdam (Aug 1994-1945?). They married August 1945 in Amsterdam.
During the war Sara Menco lost both parents in Sobibor, her brother Dave in Warsaw, his wife Lotte and her sister. Dave reported to the Police when his wife Lotte was caught. Only she and an uncle survived the war. Whilst most Dutch people were euphoric after the war, she felt lonely, guilty and wanted to be left alone.
After the war she worked as a journalist and columnist dealing with daily affairs. She wrote short stories for Mandril, Critisch Bulletin, Haarlems Dagblad and Het Parool. From 1949 to 1970 she stayed in the Witsenhouse, Oosterpark 82, Amsterdam, the old studio of Breitner and Willem Witsen, now a museum.
It took a long time before she regained the energy to delve in her painful personal past and write about it, stimulated by her husband, the poet and drama translator Bert Voeten. But then (May, 1957, The bitter herb) she wrote world literature. Whilst she wrote the book she was pregnant of her second daughter, the writer Jessica Voeten (Amsterdam, Febr 1956).
In march 1986 she published “De glazen brug” (The glass bridge), for the yearly Boekenweek.

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