In the resistance, she worked as a liaison for Colonel Josef Robotka who the communists executed in 1952.
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Vlasta Jakubová, née Nováčková, was born in Ožďany, Slovakia on 13 March 1925. Her mother was Hungarian and her father served with the gendarmerie. Vlasta’s older sister died just two weeks after birth and her brother Karel was born in 1928. The family had to move to Bohemia after the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. They moved to Náměšt’ nad Oslavou. Vlasta completed primary school in Náměšt’ and entered the Trade Academy in Třebíč but did not graduate during the war. Her uncle was Colonel Josef Robotka who co-founded the resistance organisation Rada Tří during the German occupation. When he had to leave Jihlava in the autumn of 1944, he moved in with the Nováček family in Náměšť. He involved Vlasta Jakubová in the anti-Nazi resistance as his liaison. She cycled all over the region and delivered messages to agents, never stopping even when a photograph of Josef Robotka was posted on every corner with a reward of eight thousand crowns. Vlasta Jakubová graduated after the war and worked in Brno at the Union of the National Revolution as a correspondent, but fell victim to the purges of the ‘action committees’. She then worked as a secretary to the director of Československé stavební závody construction business. Following the February 1948 coup, her uncle told her the time for resistance had come again. She acted as his liaison again passing messages to agents, mastering encryption and writing in invisible script. The messages concerned the military and Czechoslovak construction plants. She sent agents who illegally crossed the border into Czechoslovakia to conspiratorial addresses. Her brother Karel, three years younger, fled to the West and returned to Czechoslovakia several times as an agent. He was later sentenced to death in absentia. Vlasta Jakubová, Josef Robotka and other members of the resistance group were arrested by the State Security in 1949. The StB came for Vlasta Jakubová to her office on 6 August 1949. Harsh daily interrogations in Brno in Příční Street followed, and she went through cells in Orlí and Cejl. In spite of the cruel beatings, she denied everything, so they brought her uncle Josef to show her. In a politicized fabricated trial in May 1950, she was tried together with her uncle and other members of the group. The prosecutor asked a death penalty but she was eventually sentenced to 18 years of hard labor. Her uncle Josef Robotka was sentenced to death and executed in Pankrác, Prague in 1952. She went through prisons in Znojmo, Ruzyně and Pardubice, and labour units in Minkovice and Chrastava. From 1956 she worked in the technical department, processing secret documentation for MiG fighters. She was released on a ten-year parole in 1959. After returning home to her parents, she worked in a dairy and laboratory in Valašské Meziříčí. She then passed her crane operator’s exams and worked on a crane for over twenty years. After the Velvet Revolution, she received the Václav Benda Medal from the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes to personalities who fought for the restoration of freedom and democracy. She was also lauded as a participant in the anti-communist resistance. She died in Brno in 2017.
