Dear Sir,

I live in a country where the State can silence a brushstroke, condemn a vision, and brand an artist’s soul as “degenerate.” My daughter is one of those condemned souls. She was a rising star — a painter of rare talent, with a voice on canvas unlike anything I had ever seen. But her life was never easy. And when the authorities destroyed her work and defamed her art, they destroyed the fragile world she had built for herself.

She lost her home. She lost her income. She wandered the streets like a shadow, carrying nothing but the memory of her colors. Then the State Collectors seized her — dragged her away as if she were refuse — and locked her in a psychiatric hospital, claiming she suffered from “acute schizophrenia.”
She once dreamed of greatness. She once believed she could change the world with her art. She worked tirelessly, hoping that one day her paintings would hang in galleries, that people would see her soul and understand it. She was so close — so heart breakingly close — when fate intervened. The State crushed her dreams as easily as they crushed her canvases.

The hospital director allowed me to see her only once. After that, he tried to force a paper into my hands — a document that would give them guardianship over my own child. Do you know why? So they could end her life if they deemed her “untreatable.”

And then, without warning, she vanished.

The director told me she had been transferred to another facility for “better treatment,” but he refused to tell me where. I am her mother. I have the right to know what they have done to her. Instead, I am met with silence, locked doors, and cold faces.

Rumors spread like smoke through the city — whispers that disabled adults and even children are being killed, their deaths disguised as “natural causes.” I do not want to believe it, but fear has a way of tightening its grip around the truth.

My husband refuses to help. He is afraid of provoking the State. He tells me to stay quiet, to accept what has happened. My family has turned their backs. Even her friends have disappeared into the safety of silence. And now the authorities watch me as if I were the criminal.

Please help me.

Help me find my daughter. Help me save her. If she dies, my spirit dies with her. I cannot let her vanish into the darkness without a voice, without a name, without someone fighting for her.

I am her mother. I will not abandon her.