For the summer of 1939 the ben Ahmeds had made the Völkerschau a booking in Bucharest. With some difficulty they pulled a troupe together; among others, they hired the Smith family, who lived in Cologne. The parents of the family knew my father and us children from the time in the 1920s when we had all been with the Holzmüller Circus. Anne-Mary Smith, a resolute and motherly figure, was the head of a family of ten. Her husband was a quiet type, who hardly spoke a word. As far as I can recall he came from Togo. His wife was descended from a black performer from the USA, John Henry Barber, who had come to Germany between 1860 and 1870 and founded a dynasty of showmen in the Rhineland that still exists today.

One day there was a violent argument between Anne-Mary Smith and Aunt Martha, of which I was the cause. I don't remember now exactly what it was about. In any case, Anne-Mary accused Aunt Martha of treating me unfairly. I was long since used to that, but Anne- Mary Smith wasn't. She told Aunt Martha off roundly and declared that if I – Theo – was too much trouble she only had to say, and there'd be no problem feeding one more mouth – that was me – in her big family. The argument ended with no particular conclusion and no real consequences.

And so we landed in Bucharest. I still remember well how much corruption there was in Romania in those days. It dominated the country's whole public life. On the road that led out of town, where our “African village” was set up, peasants from the surrounding countryside came past carrying their produce. There were always policemen hanging around nearby to demand a kind of toll. If somebody couldn't pay they would take away the scales he used for weighing out the goods in the market, and he wouldn't get them back until he'd found the money. A few days after we arrived Uncle Mohamed had to go to some office, I think it was the immigration police, with the passports of all the members of the troupe.