The Czechoslovakian doctor, together with his Wigan-born wife Margaret, took me on a traumatic three-and-a-half-hour journey from his birthplace in the Czech city of Brno through war-torn France and Britain.

The first traumatic incident in his life occurred when Eric was only nine-months-old.

He recalled: "I was rushed to hospital with a twisted bowel problem needing emergency surgery. Naturally my parents were very worried. My father vowed that if I recovered he and his family would become more Orthodox.

"He kept his vow. However, I was sometimes naughty and played truant from shul on some Shabbat mornings to go swimming."

The Liverpool Reform Synagogue member continued: "But I gradually lapsed from Orthodoxy, especially when after a stomach ulcer at the age of 16 my doctor recommended a light diet including ham."

But non-Jewish Margaret added: "Eric still keeps the high festivals."

Eric decided to study medicine after successfully administering first aid to a friend who fell from a tree on a school outing.

He recalled: "I improvised a bandage with my scarf. My friend told me I would make a good doctor."

Eric qualified from Prague University on May 15, 1938. He started working in The Brno General Hospital as an unpaid externist.

The surgeon in charge asked him to stitch up a wound - a great honour. He knew then that he wanted to be a surgeon.

That summer he was invited for a fortnight's holiday to stay with his good friends in France at their cottage in St Georges Motel. He left his job and prepared for the journey but his mother told him to go to the spa in Moravia where his father was to say goodbye to him.

Eric said: "It was the last time I saw him."

Eric went to France and enjoyed meeting the family Nantes, his French friends, in St Georges Motel near Dreux.

Soon after that the political situation at home deteriorated with Nazi threats hanging over Czechoslovakia over the Sudetenland issue. Eric wanted to return home but his parents persuaded him to stay in France.

Eric phoned his parents and argued that he could not stay, as he had no money and was not allowed to work.

His father replied: "You soon will find work."

The family Nantes told him to stay. They were not rich but they said there would always be enough soup to share.

Back in Paris Eric was determined to improve his medical experience, so he went to various hospitals as an observer.

Meanwhile, the projectionist at the small cinema in Drancy, owned by the family with whom Eric was staying, was called up to the army.

The cinema faced closure until Eric offered to repay his hosts by volunteering to do his job.

He also volunteered for the army of Czechoslovak Government-in-exile, but it took time till he was called up, probably because there already were many doctors in the army.

When war broke out in September 1939, Eric was growing tired of waiting and turned up at the French army recruiting centre in Dreux, only to almost be arrested as an enemy alien, as it was assumed that he was a German from the Sudetenland.

Later apologising for the misunderstanding, the colonel in charge acceded to Eric's search for medical work and he was sent to work in the Dreux TB sanatorium.

Eric struck up a friendship with a young midwife in the adjacent maternity hospital from whom he used to borrow scales to weigh his baby patients.

Not surprisingly, Eric used to find more and more reasons to borrow the scales until the pair began to go on bike rides together.

Then in June 1940 Eric received his Czech call-up papers. His girl friend Andree came to say goodbye.

Their farewell was cut short when Andree had to rush back to a woman in labour in the hospital. It was then that Eric received his first horrific taste of war.

The area was hit by a German air raid. Eric managed to take shelter lying next to a tree trunk but Andree was killed instantly when the maternity wing suffered a direct hit.

In his Woolton home nearly 70 years later Eric had tears in his eyes as he told me of the death of his girlfriend.

But during the war there was no time to mourn.

The young doctor worked through the night treating the wounded evacuated from the hospital in Dreux. Then he returned to the nearby hamlet of St Georges Motel.

Eric has never forgotten the scene, which awaited him.

He recalled: "A man was lying on a bench at the station with a huge wound in his buttocks, in great pain, asking to be killed.

"I asked our neighbour for towels to pack the wound and stem the bleeding. She rushed for them but when he died in my arms."

Casualties were everywhere. Medical staff, deprived of adequate facilities and having to operate in candlelight, felt hopeless.

But Eric did not give up, determined to save as many lives as he could, keeping as a souvenir shrapnel he successfully removed from a neck wound.

With no time to sleep Eric helped his host family pack and leave for Pornic, a safer part of France. He drove them to their destination. He recalled the eight-hour journey as "most harassing".

He said: "It was hard to get petrol. We had no food but I kept awake on coffee. It was hard to say goodbye to my friends who had sheltered me for so long."

But once he had settled his hosts near Nantes, Eric had to leave for the Mediterranean coast to serve in the Czech army.

He was given the job of a doctor in an ambulance intended to collect wounded soldiers from the front. He waited one week but the drive never materialised.

The Czech soldiers were taken to the old harbour of Sete to board a troop ship. The 3,000 soldiers evacuated on board the Egyptian ship had no idea where they were heading as they zigzagged over the turbulent sea.

Besides the rampant seasickness, Eric was traumatised by the mental state of some of the desperate evacuees. One wealthy Prague woman was so worried about the fate of her husband that in her desperation, she threw her child overboard.

Two destroyers failed to find the drowned child and the woman slashed her wrist, but survived.

As it was clear that the ship was headed for Britain, Eric began learning English from a friend's book.

The ship, Mohammed Ali el-Kabir, landed in Liverpool in July 1940, weeks before she was torpedoed off the coast of Ireland.

The Czech troops were disembarked and told to march in formation to Cholmondeley Castle in Cheshire, where they settled under canvas.

With nearby Manchester and Liverpool under German fire, Eric described the situation as "very tense". Washing facilities were unavailable and Eric said that he had the "temerity" to go to a nearby hotel and ask for a bath, for which he was charged the princely sum of 6d.

Eric then had to get used to British food like corn flakes. On Yom Kippur, Eric and a Jewish friend attended a shul in Manchester where he said he was "welcomed with open arms".

Christian neighbours in Cheshire had acted similarly towards the Czech troops in their midst, he said.

With the advent of autumn the troops were moved from their tents to be billeted in the severe winter of 1940 in Leamington Spa, close to the catastrophic blitz of Coventry, where Eric rushed to try and save the dying.

But most of his time in the army, besides officer training, he spent performing menial jobs like scrubbing floors and peeling potatoes.

It was then that The Times exposed the fact that at a time when British hospitals were short staffed, Czech doctors were wasting their time on such menial tasks.

Eric was encouraged to apply for a hospital job, which he gained in Chorley, where he worked in the orthopaedic department under the guidance of consultant Mr Dwyer.

He later applied for a job as senior house officer at a York hospital, but was persuaded by Mr Dwyer to take a job as orthopaedics registrar in Wigan Infirmary.

Eric met Margaret through Czech friends, living in Wigan. They were married in January 1945.

Meanwhile, having gained his Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons, Eric moved to Liverpool's Alder Hey Children's Hospital in 1943.

With the end of World War II, keen to find out what had happened to his family, Eric responded to a call from the Czech government-in-exile for a medical group to stem the prevalent typhus epidemic in Theresienstadt.

Leaving Margaret pregnant, Eric went back to his homeland desperate to find his family. Arriving at his married sister's flat in Prague he was told by the caretaker that she and her little children had been taken by the Nazis, as had Eric's parents.

Eric cried as he recounted the tale and so did wife Margaret who said: "My father was a Methodist who could not bear the fact that children were hurt."

However, at Theresienstadt Eric discovered that his frail 73-year-old great aunt Adele had survived the Theresienstadt Ghetto. He looked after her and asked her to come to live with them in England. She declined, as she wanted to be buried in Vienna next to her husband who died before the war.

However she came to Liverpool several times for long visits before she died in Vienna, aged 87. Eric was sent some of her meagre belongings, the most precious of which was her diary.

Working in Theresienstadt Eric and his fellow medics felt virtually impotent in dealing with the rampant TB, typhus and starvation.

Then Eric heard that his brother-in-law's brother had been admitted to a Slovak hospital with septicemia following a gunshot wound. The doctor thought that the new drug penicillin would help him, as the hospital where he was did not have it.

Eric embarked on a dangerous journey across the war-torn country to deliver him the precious antibiotic. Sadly he was unable to save his life.

Eric found that two of his cousins had survived the camps. They told him that his aunt Hilda, his mother's sister, had survived in Austerlitz.

Having married a non-Jew, Aunt Hilda had been exempt from the race laws and had used her privileged position to send parcels to all her relatives in concentration camps.

They included two daughters from a previous marriage who died in Auschwitz.

Eric went to visit Aunt Hilda in Austerlitz before he returned to England, just in time for the birth of his eldest child Helen.

The couple now have three children and six grandchildren.

It was years later that Eric's connection with Austerlitz, from which both his parents originated, was renewed.

He wrote an article in the Liverpool Reform Synagogue's magazine about his return visit to the little Czech town, after which he was contacted by Neil Pike of Nottingham about a sefer Torah from the town which had come into his synagogue's possession.

Eric was glad to help Neil trace the fate of the Jews of Austerlitz.

Until three years ago Eric and Margaret made regular trips to Nottingham to attend the annual Austerlitz Shabbat and commemorate the fate of the Austerlitz Holocaust victims.