The bitter herb

A courageous, sensitive and intense account of a Jewish fugitive in Nazi-occupied Holland.

Marga Minco was a young Jewish woman in the Netherlands in 1940 who, alone, far from her family, miraculously escaped imprisonment and death in a concentration camp. In a series of vivid chronicles—her father's arrival with a package full of yellow stars to be sewn onto her clothes, the burning sensation in her scalp as she bleached her hair, the black boots seen through a grate in the basement of her family's Amsterdam home—she recounts what it was like to watch the sky darken over her country, as well as her escape, the train journeys, the hiding places on farms, the numbness of loss.

Marga Minco's story—like Anne Frank's in her diary—evokes a time and place, the setting for events never to be repeated, in moving, concise, and therefore memorable language.