In 1934 my father died at the age of 55. But our family was already completely broken apart before his death, and we didn't have a new family. The ben Ahmeds were only housing us, even though the Guardianship Court had officially made them our foster parents. They often talked about their apartment in Karlshorst. We hadn't seen it yet. But even later, after that changed, the apartment never became a home for us.

Aunt Martha and Uncle Mohamed ran a tight ship. There was constant shouting and telling-off. For members of the troupe there were sanctions for small infractions or slip-ups, for being late for an entrance, for soiling or damaging costumes and the like, in the form of fines withheld from wages. Juliana and I didn't have wages that could be docked. Instead we had our ears boxed or were beaten, often with a carpet beater or a leather belt. The occasion could be a bucket for drinking water that wasn't filled in time, or a bucket of dirty water that wasn't emptied in time – two jobs that were part of my daily duties. Every time something got broken when we were washing and drying dishes it was a catastrophe. When something like that happened it felt to me as though the world was about to end. I was still a child after all.

The 1933–34 winter season in the Staniewski Circus in Warsaw was immediately followed by a long summer season in the Knie Circus in Switzerland. The news of my father's death only reached us there, in Solothurn. Because the circus only spent a few days in each place, the news had been following us for two months. It was a catastrophe for us. Even though it was a long time since he had been able to play the role of the classical paterfamilias, he had always been there, the last fixed point of family connecting us children to each other. The fact that he hadn't been able to hold the family together and had had to entrust his children to strangers certainly contributed to his decline.