"My father founded the automobile factory Aero and later also took an interest in aviation. I decided to follow in his footsteps

"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."