The children of prisoners of the Korean War who never came home.

When the Korean War ended in 1953 about 50,000 South korean prisoners of war they were kept in the north. Many were forced to work against their will. Ssome were killed. Now your children are fighting for recognition, writes Korea BBC Subin Kim.

No matter how hard he tries, Lee can’t remember what happened after the executors who killed his father and brother fired three shots. It was three decades ago, when Lee was about thirty years old.

She remembers what happened just before. Security officers dragged her to a stadium in a remote village in North Korea called Aoji. She was forced to sit under a wooden bridge, waiting for something to happen, she didn’t know what.

A crowd grew and a truck stopped, and two people were escorted out of the truck. It was her father and her brother.

“They tied them to stakes, calling them traitors to the nation, spies and reactionaries,” Lee told the BBC in an interview recently. That is the moment when your memory wavers. “I think he was screaming,” he said. “My jaw was dislocated. A neighbor took me to his house to fix it.”

the Forgotten prisoners

Lee’s father was one of approximately 50,000 former prisoners of war who remained in the North at the end of the Korean War. The former prisoners were regrouped against their will into North Korean army units, and forced to work on reconstruction or mining projects for the rest of their lives.

When the armistice was signed on July 27, 1953, South Korean soldiers had assumed they hoped that there would be an exchange of prisoners soon and that they would be sent home. But a month before the armistice, South Korean President Syngman Rhee unilaterally released more than 25,000 North Korean prisoners to sabotage the ceasefire. He wanted UN forces to help him reunite the country under South Korea. Many believe that the move made it difficult for South Korean prisoners to be repatriated.

The North only sent a small fraction of the prisoners it had taken.

South Korea soon largely forgot about men. In subsequent years, three South Korean presidents met with North Korean leaders, but prisoners of war were never on the agenda.

In the north, the Lee family was seen as a poor population. Lee’s father was born in the South and fought alongside the United Nations forces in the Korean War, against the North, a black mark against him. The family’s low social status relegated them to heartbreaking jobs and bleak prospects. Both Lee’s father and brother worked in coal mines, where fatal accidents were frequent.

Lee’s father had a dream to return home one day, when the country would meet again. After work, he told his children stories of his youth. Sometimes, he would push his children to escape south. “There will be a medal for me and they will be treated like children of a hero,” he said.

But Lee’s brother, while drinking with friends one day, let out the things his father would say. One of the friends reported him to the authorities. Within months, Lee’s father and brother were dead.

In 2004, Lee managed to defect to South Korea. It was then that he realized his father’s mistake: his country did not see him as a hero. Little had been done to help old prisoners of war get home.

Soldiers held in North Korea suffered. They were seen as enemies of the state, men who had fought in the “puppet army” and assigned to the lowest rank in the social caste of “songbun” in North Korea.

Such a state was hereditary, so their children were not allowed to receive higher education or the freedom to choose their occupation.

Choi was a star student, but her dream of going to college was impossible due to her father’s condition. She once shouted at her father, “Reactionary scum! Why don’t you go back to your country?”

His father did not return the cry, but he said dejectedly that his country was too weak to repatriate them. Eight years ago, Choi abandoned her family and fled south.

“My father wanted to come here,” he said. “I wanted to come to the place that the person I loved the most in all my life wanted to come but was never able to. That is why I abandoned my son, my daughter and my husband.”

Choi’s father is now dead. And in South Korea, on paper, she has no father, because official documents say she died in action during the war.

Bringing my father’s bones home

Son Myeong-hwa still clearly remembers his father’s last words on his deathbed almost 40 years ago. “If you go south, you have to take my bones with you and bury me where I was born.”

Son’s father was a South Korean soldier who was from Gimhae, about 18 km from Busan. In the north, he was forced to work in coal mines and a logging factory for decades and was only allowed to return home ten days before dying of cancer.

He said to Son, “It is so bitter to die here without seeing my parents again. Wouldn’t it be nice to be buried there?”

Son defected in 2005. But it took him eight years to remove the remains of his father from North Korea. He asked his brothers to dig up his father’s remains and take them to a corridor in China. Three suitcases were needed. Two of Son’s friends came, but it was Son who carried his father’s skull.

Son protested for more than a year over recognition of his father’s status as an unrepaired soldier, and he was finally able to bury his remains in the national cemetery in 2015.

“I thought I finally did my duty as a daughter,” she said. “But it breaks my heart when I think of her having her last breath there.”

Son later discovered that the family paid a terrible price for the burial. His brothers in the north were sent to political prisons.

They are now heads of the Korean War POW Families Association, a group fighting for better treatment of approximately 110 families of South Korean soldiers who never made it home.

Through a DNA test, Son was able to prove that she was her father’s daughter, which was essential for her to apply for her unpaid salary from South Korea. Even if they manage to escape south, the children of prisoners of war are not officially recognized, and many of the non-repatriated prisoners were considered dead, discharged during the war, or simply disappeared.

Only a handful of prisoners of war who managed to escape south received unpaid wages, and those who died in captivity in the north were not eligible for any compensation.

In January, Son and his lawyers filed a case in constitutional court, arguing that the families of prisoners who died in the North had been treated unfairly and that the government had done nothing to repatriate the prisoners, holding him responsible for the prisoners. that never came. back.

“We were very sad to be born children of prisoners, and it was even more painful to be ignored even after coming to South Korea,” Son said.

“If we cannot regain the honor of our parents, the horrendous lives of prisoners of war and their children will be forgotten.”

Some names were changed to protect the safety of taxpayers. Illustrations by Davies Surya.