During the last years of the war my mother began to suffer from Meniere’s Disease, which affected the balancing components in the middle ear. She was always terribly dizzy and would sometimes keel over unexpectedly. As children we had to be very quiet, because noise upset her terribly. Now, as I am sixty years old, and my Mom ninety, she has the same disease again. When she moves through her small apartment she swings from chair to chair. It has made her life quite miserable. Yet, during her good days she could be her own jolly self again.

After school we played a lot of street soccer. I had noticed that my legs became very tired and painful. Under my knees appeared little hard bubbles, cutting of the blood supply or something like that. They were calcium deposits, which later on also appeared inside my nose. A deficiency quite common when you don’t get the proper diet, said the doctor. I needed an operation, for at night I couldn’t climb the stairs to our bedroom anymore.

So, one day my Mom took me to the University Hospital in Groningen, nurses tied me to the operation table, my mother was told to leave her little boy and, while some 50 medical students took notes when the professor explained this phenomenon, he slowly drilled holes in my knees with a small hand drill – all this without anesthetics. I screamed so hard that my mother, far away in a room, burst out in tears. They put some fluid through these holes, and after a few weeks the deposits disappeared.

About a year later, they cut these deposits out of my nose too. The surgeon took a small knife, cut the flesh inside my nose, rolled it up neatly, took a chisel and broke those deposits away from my nose cartilage. A very pleasant experience when you are held firmly by two buxom nuns. But I had been brave, said the surgeon, and as a token of appreciation, the nun put the little chips of bone in a small bottle, and I kept that bottle for many years. It got lost at Teacher’s College, where I explained to fellow students, under much laughter, about the terrible ordeal I had gone through in my youth … they actually didn’t believe that these little chips really came from my nose. Ever since that operation, my nose looked more Jewish…