One day, in the summer of 1950, I came home from Giessen to find Friedel in a state of great excitement. She waved an unopened letter under my nose; it had French stamps on it and was postmarked Paris. It was addressed to me, and that was why she hadn't opened it. I turned it over and read the sender's name: J. Michael. I couldn't believe my eyes – a letter from James or Juliana? My hands were shaking. While I was still with the UNRRA I had made an enquiry with the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen to try to locate James and Juliana, received a negative reply, and finally given up searching. I didn't ever expect to hear from my brother or my sisters. And now one of them was making contact.

The letter was from Juliana. She wrote that she would soon be coming to Germany with the Althoff Circus, which had joined up with the Cirque Bouglione for a touring season, and hoped that we could see each other again at last. I was perplexed. I had tried so hard to find her and James in France, and now she had found me! How was that possible?

Later I found out how it had happened. The Burkett family had been performing their trapeze act in the Cirque d'Hiver in Paris in the winter of 1949–50. The mornings are always used for rehearsals by the performers, and in spite of everything the sessions sometimes run over. The Burketts were waiting at the edge of the ring for the space to become free. A tiger act was being rehearsed. The tamer was a slender, pretty young “mulatto”, giving commands to the wild animals in French. The Burketts had often seen the young woman but never spoken to her. One of the tigers didn't want to go into the cage tunnel. Suddenly they heard “Come on, get in there, you damn critter!” – in German. And with that she shooed him out. Back in 1949 people avoided speaking German in France, even in the circus – let alone shouting it. And this young woman was cursing in completely unaccented German, so casually that everybody could hear.