[1] Klíma's early childhood in Prague was happy and uneventful, but this all changed with the German invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938, after the Munich Agreement.

In November 1941, first his father Vilém Klíma and then, in December, he and his mother and brother, were ordered to leave for the concentration camp at Theriesenstadt (Terezín), where he was to remain until liberation by the Red Army in May 1945.

[4] He has written that "anyone who has been through a concentration camp as a child, who has been completely dependent on an external power which can at any moment come in and beat or kill him and everyone around him - probably moves through life at least a bit differently from people who have been spared such an education.

Although he was then deprived of his passport and forced to work in menial jobs, he remained part of the literary 'underground', smuggling books and involved in samizdat.

His two-volume memoir Moje šílené století ("My Crazy Century") won the Czech literary prize, the Magnesia Litera, in the non-fiction category in 2010.