During the early 1960s, my companions and I had the impression of being so isolated that I wanted to verify that we were not living on a different planet, and if what we perceived as the condition of the poorest people also existed elsewhere and if others had become aware of the seriousness of their situation.
I went to Europe, to Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the UK. Everywhere I saw the same level of extreme poverty faced by people in the lower reaches of society. Everywhere I came up against the same lack of awareness about these people. In Berlin, for example, I discovered a disused garage crammed with families dressed in rags, with no work, no food.
In England, I visited an old people’s home that had been divided in two with one half allocated to families in extreme poverty, and the other half reserved for the elderly and sick. The children were distracted by the almost daily spectacle of ambulances and hearses coming and going. As for the home’s manager who had the keys to all the flats, he could barge into the families’ lives at any time.
This made it all the more clear to me that, once the authorities accept to look after them, the very poorest people are treated in the same way everywhere: exposed to constant humiliation and reduced to enduring arbitrary interventions that deny their very existence as human beings.