One day I was handed a big paper cone filled with fruit and sweets and had to go to school. It was very close to our house. On the first day, a boy about my age came up to me beaming and said, “Want to be friends?” Of course I said yes. He was called Horst, was known as “Hotte”, had unruly straw-colored hair and freckles. His father was unemployed, like many other fathers. So like me, Hotte was allowed to eat the free school meals that an American Christian organization – I think it was the Quakers – provided for German children after the First World War. We met up, played and did our homework together. But his parents soon moved away and we never saw each other again.

All in all I really enjoyed school; I made a lot of friends there and always had company on my way to school. In the classroom we were still using slate boards in the first year, and ancient textbooks that had passed through the hands of generations of schoolchildren. I was a fast learner and was seated in the front row, where the best pupils sat. If you got bad marks, you had to move back, and if you were really unlucky you landed in the back row. Of course we all – it was a boys’ school – developed quite a strong ambition to move right up to the front.

My first teacher was called Mrs Hering. We pupils always shouted “Miss!”, because in those days most women schoolteachers were unmarried. Every time, she emphatically corrected that “Miss” to “Mrs”. But there were dark sides to my good relationship with other children and schoolmates. Whenever the boys got up to mischief, as boys do at that age – and I was usually involved, if only passively – I was the only one who could be identified, because of the way I looked. My foster mother's advice: “Keep away from the bad boys.” It didn't help much.

My father often came to visit us in Saarbrücker Strasse. Sometimes he took me with him on his walks around the neighborhood.