I was born in Budapest on 21 May 1935. My father, Dr László Karátson, was a lawyer, and my maternal grandfather, Viktor Olgyai, was a graphic artist and painter, the founder of the Graphics Reproduction Department at the Budapest College of Fine Arts, and the mentor of some renowned Hungarian graphic artists. I don’t remember going through a “drawing phase” as a child (although this means nothing: my childhood was essentially obliterated by my mother’s death, falling bombs, and flight. As an adult, I would show far greater interest in the drawings chalked on the street by children in the 1970s, relics of a lost Atlantis submerged by the power of television: I published much of my collection in my 1997 book Az együgyű Isten [The simple god]). I must have been about seven when I was introduced to a newly published collection of etchings by Rembrandt, which made a huge impression on me. In fact, I produced my own “Rembrandt collection”. At the age of 10, while sheltering in the basement during the siege, I even produced “Japanese woodcuts”, based on memories of my grandfather’s Japanese woodcut collection. These have all disappeared, although the watercolours I happily painted on the shore of Lake Lucerne in Switzerland at the age of 12, inspired by the mountains and the lake, survive to this day.

In that charmed and peaceful world, safe from the hell of war, I was fortunate to encounter the works of Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Dürer, and Konrad Witz in the museums and touring exhibitions. Strangely, the Chinese characters that would later come to mean so much to me are already apparent in the skies of these Swiss landscapes: I had carried with me from Budapest to Switzerland a 10-year-old’s burgeoning love of Lao Tzu and Confucius.

So it would have been quite natural for me to want to be a painter, had not my boundless yearning for freedom and my multifarious interests prevented me from “wanting to be” anything at all.