CHARACTER
The Storyteller by Jodi Picoult

Minka Singer

Minka Singer

Quick Facts

  • Role: Grandmother of Sage Singer; Holocaust survivor and the novel’s emotional historian
  • First appearance: Present-day as “Nana”; full first-person account revealed in Part II
  • Key settings: Łódź (youth and ghetto), Auschwitz (imprisonment), Neusalz and Bergen-Belsen (late war), postwar America
  • Distinguishing details: Leopard prints, bright blush, colorful canes, and a faded Auschwitz tattoo she hides under long sleeves

Who They Are

Bold, loving, and fiercely private, Minka Singer is the living bridge between the novel’s past and present. To her family she is “Nana,” a warm, slightly flamboyant grandmother; to the reader she becomes the book’s conscience, the keeper of a story that refuses to disappear. Her narrative transforms private memory into communal history, forcing the present-day plot to reckon with what survival costs—and what justice can still mean.

Even her appearance tells a story: the hidden tattoo she calls proof that “she won,” the bright clothes that insist on life, the cane that signals age but not surrender. As a girl, she downplays her looks—crooked tooth, a belly that “pooched out”—yet loves her thick, wavy hair. When it is shaved at Auschwitz, the loss becomes a visceral emblem of identity stripped away.

Personality & Traits

Minka’s character blends imaginative intellect with iron resilience. She reads rooms as acutely as she reads stories, and she survives by turning narrative into a lifeline. After the war, her privacy becomes its own act of care: a wall built to shelter her family from the fire that forged her.

  • Imaginative storyteller: As a teen she invents an upiór tale; in Auschwitz she expands it, reciting episodes to soothe Darija’s agony and sustain their block’s morale. Writing the story across salvaged scraps gives shape to chaos and makes meaning where the regime insists there is none.
  • Intelligent and perceptive: Academically advanced (she skips two grades), she later applies that acuity to the camp’s perilous hierarchies—watching, recalibrating, surviving.
  • Resilient and brave: She endures the ghetto, selections, forced labor, the death march, and starvation without surrendering her inner self, drawing strength from friendship, memory, and the discipline of telling.
  • Secretive and protective: In America she buries the “other person” she became during the war, covering her tattoo and her past alike to safeguard her son and grandchildren.
  • Loving and loyal: Devotion to her father Abram, her sister Basia, nephew Majer, and friend Darija governs her choices; after the war, that love reshapes into fierce caretaking of Sage.

Character Journey

Minka’s arc runs from girlish preoccupations—schoolwork, a crush, afternoons at the Astoria Café—into the brutality of occupation and ghettolization, where survival eclipses innocence overnight. In Auschwitz she is separated from her father, shorn, and shoved into a world designed to dehumanize her. She learns the camp’s logic, endures Kanada under the watch of SS officers, and keeps Darija alive as long as she can with a story that refuses to end. After the death march and liberation from Bergen-Belsen, she emigrates to the United States, marries, and becomes a mother and grandmother—deliberately sealing the past behind a new identity. Her final turn comes when she chooses to tell her full history to Sage and Leo Stein. By speaking, she passes on responsibility as well as memory, igniting the present-day moral reckoning over Forgiveness and Justice.

Key Relationships

  • Abram Lewin (father): Abram is Minka’s early compass—tender, witty, and protective. Their dark-humored “plans” for his funeral become an intimacy that outlives him; after his murder, his remembered voice steadies her in Auschwitz and shapes her ethic of witness.
  • Darija Horowicz (best friend): With Darija, Minka’s youth feels intact—shared jokes, ordinary crushes, first drafts of the upiór story. In the camp, their bond becomes sacramental: the story transfers breath to Darija until the Schutzhaftlagerführer, Reiner Hartmann, murders her. That killing fixes Minka’s view of forgiveness as a right belonging only to the victim.
  • Franz Hartmann (Hauptscharführer): The SS chief of Kanada, whom Minka nicknames “Herr Dybbuk,” alternately preserves and imperils her. He makes her his secretary and compels her to write for his pleasure, a warped patronage that exposes the moral grotesquerie of power that can mimic protection while it exploits.
  • Sage Singer (granddaughter): To Sage, “Nana” is warmth and whimsy—until trust opens the door to the past. Confiding in Sage redefines their bond from comfort to inheritance; Minka’s truth equips Sage to confront both her own scars and the ethical snarl of the present.

Defining Moments

  • The Astoria Café raid — Her date, Josek, is beaten and arrested. The scene detonates her last illusions about safety and foreshadows the arbitrariness of the violence to come.
  • Arrival and shearing at Auschwitz — Separated from her father during selection, she is sent to work only because an officer hears her German; then her hair is shaved. The sequence crystallizes survival as luck while the shearing embodies the erasure of self.
  • Storytelling in the barracks — She narrates the upiór tale to distract Darija from a searing toothache, then continues for the block. Story becomes oxygen: a covert economy of meaning in a world built to nullify it.
  • Witnessing Darija’s murder — Reiner Hartmann shoots Darija in front of Minka. The act is the moral core of her testimony and the origin of her stance that forgiveness can only belong to the murdered.
  • The death march and liberation — She escapes the march from Neusalz and is ultimately liberated from Bergen-Belsen. Survival here is not triumph but endurance—the precondition for reinvention and testimony.
  • Identifying Reiner Hartmann — In the present, she studies a photo array and links the killer to Josef Weber, anchoring memory to evidence and binding past atrocity to present accountability.

Themes & Symbolism

Minka personifies Memory, History, and Storytelling: her tale-within-the-tale insists that history is a mosaic of singular lives, not statistics. Writing on the backs of photographs—images salvaged from the plunder of victims—turns dispossession into remembrance and keeps voices inside the silence that tried to swallow them.

She also embodies Loss and Grief: the shaved hair, the missing family, the unfillable space Darija once occupied. Yet grief never cancels duty. In America, her guarded reinvention speaks to Identity and Reinvention: the attempt to live forward without betraying what came before. The hidden tattoo—concealed yet never erased—captures that paradox perfectly.

Essential Quotes

My father trusted me with the details of his death. Minka, he would say, when my mother read me the story of Snow White, make a note: I do not want to wind up in a glass case with people looking at me... My father trusted me with the details of his death, but in the end, I couldn’t manage a single one.

This memory fuses love, humor, and helplessness. Planning death as a family joke becomes, in retrospect, a ritual of intimacy—and the failure to “manage a single one” registers the brutality of a history that made even dignified mourning impossible.

When I got here, to America, this is when my life began. Everything before . . . well, that happened to a different person.

Reinvention protects her and her family, but the sentence also trembles with fracture. The “different person” is both a survival strategy and an acknowledgment that trauma splits the self into before and after.

I could never forgive the Schutzhaftlagerführer for killing my best friend. No, Sage. I mean I couldn’t—literally—because it is not my place to forgive him. That could only be done by Darija, and he made that impossible.

Minka reframes forgiveness as a moral right, not a universal obligation. The line rebukes easy calls for closure and centers the dead as the only ones entitled to absolve their killers.

This is my story. It’s not the one you’re looking for, about what happened during the war. That’s not nearly as important. Because this story, it’s the one that kept me alive.

She distinguishes between a catalog of atrocities and the sustaining force of narrative. Her story’s value is not simply documentary; it functioned as a survival technology that gave structure to chaos.

If you lived through it, you already know there are no words that will ever come close to describing it. And if you didn’t, you will never understand.

A sober warning about the limits of representation. Even as Minka testifies, she recognizes the gap between experience and language—and the responsibility to speak anyway.