"I was young back then and I didn’t see the appeal of staying in one city for too long. I had an adventurous spirit; I wanted to see the world

"I was born in the spring of 1936 in Ashiya, Japan as the only son of a Czechoslovak diplomat, Jan Fierlinger. As the war was drawing near, my father was ordered to return to Czechoslovakia."

"About a week before the end of the war, in May 1945, I became a partisan. We ambushed a Sokol gymnasium in Nový Bydžov, where the Germans kept their weapons

"Even though I’m Czech, in 1922, when I was born – just a year after my sister Vlasta – our family was living in Warsaw

"After I completed military training, I got a job at the Ministry of Finance; they sent me to Cheb, since I knew the German language

"From the very start, the problem I had in the communistic Czechoslovakia was that my parents encouraged us to be honest and truthful. We wouldn’t be deterred, even when they fired my father from the police force and he could only work as an unqualified labourer after

"The communist regime seemed to be at the height of its power when I graduated from the Charles University’s Faculty of Medicine in 1961. The path to my graduation was by no means a straight line."

"One day I was offered to participate in an audition for a cabaret dancer at Alhambra. It was one of those really strange auditions, but I was chosen. However, I only stayed there for a short time."

"Growing up, it did not even cross my mind that I would witness so much sorrow and live through the Terezin concentration camp. If you wanted to survive in the ghetto, you had to suppress your feelings and work very hard."

“Our most beautiful and earliest memories are of playing games together in the garden with stones and paths of yellow sand. After the war, everything started to change, and as father inferred, not in a positive direction.”