“I was always there whenever it came to castrating. Usually, a knife sufficed for it, however, with the especially wild young bulls, one had to apply the hammer method, which meant slitting open the scrotum, taking out the testicles, and smashing them with a wooden hammer. ... I was twenty-one. The golden age of my life. I had a lot of extravagant dreams, I wanted to love, I wanted to eat, and with the blink of an eye, transform myself into a cloud drifting half in the light, half in the dark. Only later did it become clear to me: living means that, in a long, agonizing process, one gets their balls mashed with a hammer.”