The embassy told me everything would be fine. Of course, that was a lie.
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Vlasta Voskovcová was born on May 14, 1950 in Pelhřimov as Vlasta Šabacká. She grew up in the family of a First Republic officer who was still working at the General Staff at the time of her birth, but soon retired due to illness. She spent her childhood and youth in Třebíč, where she graduated from high school in 1968. After the holidays, she started studying Czech language - fine arts at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University. In the autumn of 1969, shortly before the state border was closed, she left for France, where she worked for the first two months in a winery in the Champagne region. In December 1969 she moved to Paris and received political asylum there. In Paris, she studied drawing at the Académie des beaux-arts from 1970 to 1974. In 1973, an amnesty for emigrants was announced; Vlasta decided to return temporarily to Czechoslovakia to legalize her stay and settle family affairs. However, she arrived just after the amnesty expired, at the beginning of January 1974. She was arrested at Ruzyně airport and then prosecuted for emigration. The police later tried to charge her with prostitution and cronyism. She managed to leave Czechoslovakia only in December 1974, following a presidential pardon and French intervention (at that time she was formally married to a French citizen, the poet Alain Joubert). During her stay in Czechoslovakia in 1974, she met the poet and later signatory of Charter 77, Prokop Voskovec. He emigrated in 1979, and in the following years they lived together in Paris; they married in 1981 and had a son, Jonathan. Together with her husband, she worked with the magazine Svědectví and participated in the Fondation pour une entraide intellectuelle européenne, which supported intellectuals from the Soviet bloc. Vlasta and Prokop Voskovec remained in France after the fall of the communist regime. Vlasta Voskovcová still works as an artist and exhibits her paintings in France, Belgium and the Czech Republic.
