Gabor Maté

Well, at that time...

For a period of time, the Russians allowed the borders to be fairly porous and as a way of, as a safety valve really.

And I think nearly 200,000 Hungarians crossed the border into Austria and moved to the West, many of them to Australia and to North America, a few of them elsewhere in Europe.

To tell you the truth, I was 13 years old at the time, kind of a budding little European, Eastern European intellectual.

I grew up in a city with a sense of history, monuments, tradition.

And Vancouver on the wild west coast of Canada seemed very new and bland and rather uninteresting to me.

It took me a while to become acclimatized to Canadian culture.

You know, I still remember the greatest hits of 1957, which is when we arrived there.

So getting into the pop culture was a way of acclimatizing myself to Canadian culture.

And for some time I gave up my more European interests of classical music and deep reading and so on.

Well, all my life, that was my ambition.

That was my intention.

That was my calling.

My grandfather, who died in Auschwitz, had been a physician.

In the 70s, he was also a writer.

And I thought about it.

There was a genuine calling to alleviate suffering in the world.

And of course, the practice of medicine is one beautiful way to do that.

But I'd wondered since as well, was I trying to replace my grandfather in my mother's heart who was deeply in mourning all her life about her idealized father and was I trying to, in a sense, supplant him?

Was that part of my motivation?