The family moved to Breda, a predominantly Catholic town near her birthplace, when Sara was a young girl, and she went to the local public school.

[1] Minco began work as a trainee journalist at the Bredasche Courant [nl] in 1938, first writing about films, and then eventually becoming a member of the editorial staff.

[1] Following the German invasion of the Netherlands in May 1940, and even before proclamation by the occupying forces of anti-Jewish measures, she was fired by order of the newspaper's German-sympathizing board.

[citation needed] In the early part of World War II Minco lived in Breda, Amersfoort, and Amsterdam.

Having escaped arrest herself she spent the rest of the war in hiding, after bleaching her hair and obtaining a fake ID card.

[2] Minco met poet, journalist and translator Bert Voeten [nl] (1918–1992),[3][b] in 1938 while working at the Bredasche Courant.

The title of her later book Een leeg huis ("An empty house") refers not only to the demolished house that the protagonist finds after emerging from hiding at the end of the occupation but also to the emptiness that she and her friend Yona experience in the postwar years, to which was added the distance and sometimes even hostility displayed by many people in the Netherlands towards returnees from the concentration camps.