I stopped to look at the people getting out, as if I were waiting for someone. Someone with a familiar face who would suddenly be standing right in front of me. But I lacked my uncle’s faith. They would never come back. Not my father, not my mother, not Bettie, not Dave and not Lotte, either.

Translator’s note

Bitter Herbs was first published in 1957, and the next year Marga Minco was awarded the Vijverberg Prize of the Jan Campert Foundation for the best Dutch debut novel. It was incredibly well received and made the author into one of the best known Dutch writers of the post-war era. Bitter Herbs eventually became required high school reading in the Netherlands. In her acceptance speech at the Vijverberg Prize ceremony, Minco said:

‘I would have preferred not to have had a reason to write Bitter Herbs. But the facts are there, as is the book. And what counts for me is that those to whom I dedicated the book will now perhaps live on, and not only in my memory.’

In the twenty-two chapters of Bitter Herbs the narrator recounts what happened to her family during World War II. The story parallels events in the author’s life but is not strictly autobiographical since the narrator is a girl between 14 and 18 years old while the author was between 20 and 25 when the events of Bitter Herbs took place. The narrator should therefore not be confused with the author. The girl’s innocence and ignorance illustrate the unawareness and incomprehension of most Dutch Jews about the lot awaiting them.

The chapters were written at different times as individual stories, and so can be read separately, but in the end Minco arranged them in chronological order and added to them to create Bitter Herbs. The chapter Lepelstraat is an example. In 1943, when she lived in Sarphatistraat with her parents, the author witnessed the forced removal of the residents of Lepelstraat in the heart of the Jewish area of Amsterdam. Minco wrote about the event, but she lost her writings and many other things after her escape. However, when she was organising and arranging the stories, she remembered what she had witnessed in Lepelstraat and managed to rewrite it almost word for word. In 1948 or 1949 she wrote The garden gate, later retitled The men, which became a key chapter of Bitter Herbs. The chapter Camping mugs was published as a standalone piece in a literary magazine in 1953.

Minco’s style is deceptively simple, beautiful, and direct. In translating her work, there are times that an extra word or two had to be added in order for twenty-first-century readers to understand references that would have been obvious to readers in the post-World War II era. And not only that – there is a difference between the Dutch for whom World War II is still an ever-present reality, and the rest of the world.

Unavoidably there are many Dutch place names in the book, and mostly it’s clear that those are streets and squares in Amsterdam and in other Dutch cities. But in the chapter Bitter herbs, the narrator wants to see her parents again before they’re deported and says to her brother: ‘I could wait in front of the Hollandse Schouwburg where they’re being held.’ The Hollandse Schouwburg [Dutch Theatre] has a significance that may not be immediately obvious. Before the war it was a theatre, but during the occupation, the Germans made it into a Jewish theatre where only Jews could perform and only Jews were allowed in the audience. Starting in mid-October 1942, it was turned into the central deportation centre where the Germans processed the Jews for removal from Amsterdam to transit camps Westerbork and Vught (and from there to the East: Auschwitz, Sobibor, etc.). Enormous crowds were interned in the theatre, at times more than 1,500 people with their allowed baggage. They were stuck there for days and sometimes weeks with no room to sleep, abominable hygienic conditions and unbearable noise. In 1962 it was made into a national memorial to the deported Jews.