Josef Schlesinger, was a Canadian foreign correspondent, television journalist, and author.
Early life and career
Schlesinger was born to a devout Jewish family in Vienna, Austria, on May 11, 1928. He was raised in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, where his parents, Emmanuel and Lilli Schlesinger, owned a cleaning supplies shop. After Czechoslovakia was occupied by Germany in 1938, he and his younger brother, Ernest, were sent to England by his parents as part of the kindertransport, organized by Nicholas Winton, that rescued 669 Jewish children. His parents were later killed in the Holocaust. Schlesinger appears in and narrates the 2011 documentary Nicky's Family about Winton and the kindertransport. Schlesinger pursued a journalism career after the war, first working at the Prague bureau of the Associated Press in 1948 as a translator. He fled Czechoslovakia after its Communist government began arresting journalists, crossing the border into Austria. In 1950, he immigrated to Canada. He arrived at Pier 21 in Halifax and travelled across the country to Vancouver to join his brother, who had immigrated to Canada earlier under the Canadian Jewish War Orphans Project. After studying at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and editing the student newspaper, he reported for the city's afternoon newspaper, The Province, before moving to the Toronto Daily Star. He then left Canada and edited for UPI in London and the International Herald Tribune in Paris.
Career with the CBC
Schlesinger returned to Canada in 1966 and joined the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as executive producer of The National but soon returned to reporting and served as the CBC's foreign correspondent variously in Hong Kong, Paris, Washington and Berlin, reporting on the Vietnam War, the Cultural Revolution and Ping-pong diplomacy in China, the Iranian Revolution, guerrilla wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and ultimately the fall of the Iron Curtain including the Velvet Revolution in his homeland of Czechoslovakia. In 1990, he wrote his autobiography, Time Zones: a Journalist in the World, which became a bestseller. Schlesinger described his early career in an interview with Czech public radio Radio Prague, aired on March 21, 2005. In the early 1990s Schlesinger was promoted to managing editor of CBC News, producing commentaries and documentaries for the short-lived CBC Prime Time News. He retired from full-time employment in 1994, but continued to produce essays and special reports for CBC News. In the last half of the 1990s he became host of a few foreign news magazine programs on CBC Newsworld, including Foreign Assignment, and Schlesinger. He continued to produce occasional documentaries for the CBC and write commentaries for the CBC News website into his eighties.
