During her visit to New York, President Čaputová conferred the state decoration Order of the White Double Cross of the second class to Ružena Bajcsy, a Slovak scientist living in the United States, for spreading the good name of the Slovak Republic.

Ružena Bajcsy is a pioneer in robotics and artificial intelligence, which are sectors with a growing impact on our everyday life.  Twenty years ago, Discover Magazine named her among the fifty most important women in the world in science.  However, her life story is also extraordinary. According to the Nation’s Memory Institute, the tragedies and disappointment she experienced could fill several human lives with feelings of futility and unhappiness. However, her invincible will and determination enabled her to overcome all obstacles.   

Both totalitarian regimes that ruled Slovakia cruelly and mercilessly entered her life. The fascist Slovak State deprived her of her closest relatives and the communist regime deprived her of opportunities. As a child she lost her mother; and later, only thanks to coincidence, she escaped the gestapo and the transport train to a concentration camp, where her father and stepmother died. She spent a week alone in the family’s empty apartment, but her parents never returned. In the years that followed, she experienced the fear and indifference of her surroundings and moments of loneliness, which she overcame with the help of the study of mathematics.
Perhaps it was science, which symbolically brings order and a system into our world, that helped Ružena Bajcsy to mature and discover her talent for technology and research. But in the period in which she acquired education and work experience, the communist ideologists considered cybernetics as a “bourgeois pseudoscience”. Today it seems funny but then it was the cruel reality.   

Thanks to luck and a certain amount of necessity, she eventually found her home and primarily an environment favourable for her work, professional growth and the application of her knowledge and exceptional gifts in the United States of America. Ultimately, her decision to not return after the Soviet invasion and occupation of her homeland resulted in another separation from her closest family, her two children.   

Only the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 reunited the family when both of her children moved to the US to be with their mother.  By that time, she had become an expert in computer science. Her life story and successes represent a distinctive message for further generations of young scientists. It is the steadfast conviction that every human being should have the chance to live a full and satisfying life. And no ideology or political regime should deprive him/her of this fundamental right.