Although he wrote about other subjects — in his 1959 short story collection, “The Other Side,” for example, he told a fictional story about a housewife trying to explain to a detective why she shoplifted – Ms. Minco always returns to his personal experiences from the war and the post-war period.
He was influenced by postwar European absurdist writers, many of whom were poets, Mr. Spijkers said. His writing process often involves paring sentences down to their bare essence.
“He’s like the Raymond Carver of Dutch literature,” Mr. Schiferli said. “All that can be left is left, but the theme is so great, it is almost unbearable.”
He added, “It’s mostly what’s not said or not written that makes it so powerful.”
Sara Minco was born on March 31, 1920, in the village of Ginneken, Netherlands. He was the youngest of three children of Salomon Minco, a traveling salesman, and Grietje Minco-Van Hoorn.
Sara aspired to be a writer from a young age; at age 18, as soon as he finished high school in the nearby city of Breda, he got a job as an apprentice reporter for his local newspaper, The Bredasche Courant, writing reviews and news items.
In May 1940, not long after the German invasion, Ms. Minco was removed from his position because he was Jewish. His parents believed that the work would not be difficult, and they did not have the resources to flee, so the family stayed.
His sister was the first to be deported, along with her husband, followed by his brother and his wife. Forced to move to the Jewish ghetto in Amsterdam, her parents were arrested there in 1943. Ms. Minco, who was with them at the time, escaped through a garden fence and hid for the rest of the war. After the liberation of the Netherlands in 1945, he found that he was the only remaining member of his extended family, except for an uncle.
