K. Příběh jednoho hledání – Kucinski B. (2020)

The story of the search for the author's missing sister, who became involved in activities against the military regime in Brazil, was kidnapped and murdered. The novel belongs to the so-called literature of testimony. Brazilian writer, journalist, and political scientist B. Kucinski (born 1937) opens in his debut novel from 2011 a trauma that Brazilian society has yet to come to terms with: the question of people who disappeared for political reasons during the period of military dictatorship that ruled from 1964 to 1985, and whose fate remains unknown even decades later. The novel is based on a true event from April 1974, when the author's five years younger sister Ana Rosa Kucinski Silva, a chemistry teacher at the University of São Paulo, and her husband were kidnapped and subsequently murdered for political reasons. Both were members of the armed leftist anti-government guerrilla organization National Liberation Alliance. The main character of the story, referred to as K., a Polish Jew who fled Europe in 1933 to escape Nazism, searches for his daughter and her fate, and in his futile attempts to navigate the absurd labyrinth of state power, he notes parallels between the military regime and the Nazi regime.