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SEOUL: As a teenager in North Korea, Lee Soon-keum bitterly resented her father, a prisoner of war, as his status meant that he would have to work in coal mines like him.
Years later, she says she was forced to watch him and her brother execute them by firing squad.
After the Korean War ended in 1953, North Korea held tens of thousands of captured troops from the South, putting them to work in its mines and construction sites.
The fugitives and activists say their descendants have inherited their fate, condemned to work excavating coal, one of Pyongyang’s main sources of income until sanctions blocked exports.
Growing up in Kyonghung, in the far northwest of the country, Lee knew from an early age that, like almost all the daughters of prisoners of war, she would be sent to the mines for seven years after leaving school.
“When I was 13, I found out that my father was a prisoner of war and I really resented him for that,” he said.
“I asked him why they didn’t kill him in the war so that he wouldn’t have met my mother and given us birth.”
North Korean defector Lee Soon-keum, the daughter of a South Korean prisoner of war, says she was very resentful of her father for being a South Korean prisoner of war because she would have to work in coal mines like him. (Photo: AFP / Jung Yeon-je)
Lee, who defected to the south in 2010 and now lives in Seoul, told AFP that his father’s longing to return to his South Korean hometown of Pohang was his undoing.
He regularly sang his praises of her and her brothers, telling them that they would be received there as “the sons of a hero” when the peninsula was reunited.
But his brother, also assigned to work at the mine, repeated his boasting in a drinking session with co-workers, one of whom reported them to the authorities.
One night six months later, security personnel arrived at the family home and dragged Lee’s brother away. A few weeks later they returned for their father.
She didn’t hear anything else, until one day the guards took her, without explanation, to a vacant lot next to a bridge where a crowd had gathered.
A jeep arrived with the two men, who looked weak and as if they had been beaten.
“My brother had shrunk like a child and my father had dried up like a twig,” Lee said.
Lee Soon-keum says she was taken to a vacant lot where her father and brother were executed by a North Korean firing squad. (Photo: AFP / Jung Yeon-je)
An official denounced them as traitors before they were tied to two posts on the ground.
Teams of three executioners shot both dead.
Lee’s mind has locked out the moment they were killed, but she looked at her father in the last seconds of her life and collapses at the memory.
“As my father looked at me,” she said, “it seemed like he was telling me to go back to his hometown.”
