"They interrogated me and the gentleman said, 'Do you know how they call women like you? You've lived all over the world.' They knew exactly where I went all the time. 'You are called fighter jets.' I said, 'This is the first time I've heard that, why like that?' - 'And you know what, we can give you an emigration passport. Why are you here? Why don't you and your husband go back to the Czech Republic? There are so many possibilities. Now the pipeline is going to be built, [the husband] is qualified for that. You would have everything there. We will give you everything. You will get everything there.' I hated it so much, I really didn't want to. And they started asking me who I was seeing. And I said, 'What do you want me to do, why would you give me all this stuff?' I said. 'You give us the information.' Like that. And I was like, 'What information?' I haven't lived there, I don't know for how long. 'What kind of information would I give you?' - 'Information about people who are in emigration.' And of course, I didn't want to do it, I filled out the application form, then I went to Toronto [where she was living at the time] and I called them and said I didn't want to do it, let them throw it in the trash. He said to me, 'You're a beast. You're a pretty beast to be able to leave your grandmother and grandfather, who raised you, to die alone.'"
"I heard the phone ringing, and I also heard: vrrr... a sound almost like a storm. And I thought to myself: It's probably a storm, the boys and girls will have to call off their trip. The phone rang and my friend Miloš was on the phone shouting: 'We are being occupied by the Russians! The Russians are occupying us, they're already in Prague!' We were living on Sokolovská Street, where Cyril and Methodius Square [now Karlín Square] was, and I ran into the living room and looked, and there were tanks with a red star, with soldiers with machine guns. And my first impulse was to find out what I was going to do and how I was going to fight. I didn't even think of a gas oven or anything like that. And we all felt tremendous energy. But I had a problem because my mother left. She just took everything that was in the apartment, most of it, and drove to Austria. And I didn't even know she'd left. And Daddy and about four other pilots decided, when they heard that the Russians had crossed the border into Slovakia, that they were going to fight. They went to Kbely [military airport], but somebody turned them in, so they just got arrested. So Daddy... I didn't know where he was. Then I found out he was in prison. And my younger sister was pregnant at the time and she was staying with the parents of her husband, so I was there alone with my 11-year-old sister. And I didn't know what to do with her, I didn't know what was going to happen, nobody anywhere, and I had no money. So I decided to hitchhike to Havlíčkův Brod, to take her to ouéír grandmother."
Rostya Gordon-Smith was born on 19 June 1949 in Havlíčkův Brod. She was named after her father, Colonel Rostislav Lusk, one of Czechoslovak’s elite military aviators. Her mother, Jiřina, née Fidlerová, came from an entrepreneurial family in Havlíčkův Brod; her parents found it difficult to accept that their daughter’s husband was a member of the Communist Party. He perceived it as a necessary tax for fulfilling his lifelong dream to fly. Rostya’s parents had two more daughters. Rostya stayed with her grandparents until the end of primary school. She began her high school studies in Prague, where she moved to live with her parents. However, she did not feel comfortable there; her parents were authoritative and had disputes, that culminated in a divorce. At the time of the August invasion by the Warsaw Pact troops (1968), Rostya was not even nineteen years old, yet, she decided to emigrate to England without money or knowledge of the language. Despite her difficult beginnings in London, she soon graduated from university. She married an English civil engineer who worked all over the world accompanied by his family. They had four sons. Rostya continued to further her education while traveling and eventually made a career in the management and development of organizations, people, and teams not only in the Czech Republic, where she moved in the 1990s, but in many other countries. She also founded her consulting company People Impact s.r.o. In 2011, together with Věra Staňkova, she published the book “Successful on the job market”; she is the author of many articles in national and international magazines. After ending her active career, she founded the non-profit organization Minerva 21 in 2015, to which she is still fully dedicated. At the time of the recording, she was living with her husband in Prague.
