Joe Schlesinger

Josef Schlesinger, (May 11, 1928 – February 11, 2019) 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 (Fischl) 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.