[1] He was raised in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, where his parents, Emmanuel and Lilli (Fischl) Schlesinger, owned a cleaning supplies shop.
[1][3] 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.
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.
[7] 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,[8] the Iranian Revolution,[8] 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.
On June 8, 2011, he received an honorary doctorate of letters from the University of Alberta in Edmonton for his long and distinguished career,[citation needed] and also delivered a speech to part of the U of A's 2011 graduating class of the Faculty of Arts.