Het Bittere Kruid is te proeven vanaf de eerst bladzijde tot de laatste in dit relaas van Marga over wat er met haar familie gebeurde en eigenlijk met de hele Nederlandse Joodse gemeenschap.
"Ze doen ons niets" mompelde haar vader, en ik krijg het onbehaaglijke gevoel alsof de ouders van Marga in totale ontkenning en met open ogen hun noodlot tegemoet zijn gegaan.
Toch is er dat moment waar Marga en haar vader een uitweg zoeken gehurkt achter een boom, een plekje om te schuilen, mogelijk voor later, maar het mocht niet zo zijn.
De vanzelfsprekendheid waarmee de ster op de kleding werd genaaid alsof het een lintje van de koningin betrof, het vertrek na de oproep om naar Amsterdam terug te keren, alsof het de gewoonste zaak ter wereld was, de schijnbare zekerheid: "In Breda hadden we zo een adres" alsof alle vrienden klaar stonden om onderduikers te herbergen...
Hemeltergend is het verhaal van het buurmeisje dat even de spullen meeneemt, alsof ze wil zeggen "jullie komen toch nooit meer terug".
Het is 2024: er lopen geen soldaten door de straten maar wel schreeuwers die intifada roepen (dat een oproep is tot het vermoorden van alle joden), "ze doen ons niets" wordt misschien ook nu gedacht, door jood en niet-jood. Dit boekje is na de reeds 66e druk in 2023 misschien wel actueler dan ooit. En zou verplicht gelezen moeten worden door iedere Nederlander die nog 'begrijpend' kan lezen... de rest snapt het al niet meer of heeft de kant reeds gekozen van de haat ( )

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. ( )

"Posò il pacchetto sul tavolo e noi tutti l'osservammo incuriositi. Era legato con uno spago, e mio padre si mise pazientemente a scioglierne il nodo. Poi con gesti misurati cominciò a scartarlo. Erano le stelle." "Ne ho portate diverse per ciascuno di noi," disse "così le potrete cucire su tutti i capi d'abbigliamento". Mia madre ne prese in mano una e la osservò attentamente. "Vedrò se in casa ho del filo giallo". (fonte retro di copertina)

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. ( )