Children dying of hunger in North Korea.
CNN (excerpts):
During
a sleepless night, Song Ee Han agonized over a decision: Was she
willing to leave her youngest child behind while she and her daughters
escaped North Korea?
The next morning, Han knelt beside her only surviving son,
5-year-old BoKum, searching for the right words. He looked half his age, his
distended belly protruding awkwardly from his tiny frame. He was weakened and
fatigued from their journey. They had stopped at a friend's house less than
halfway to the border, and Han and her daughters were too small or weak to
carry him.
"Why are you taking my sisters, but not me?" he
wailed.
"Don't worry," Han said. She promised him rice and
cookies. "We will come get you in five days." They counted to five
together, first on her fingers, which were contorted and scarred from torture.
Then they counted to five on BoKum's scrawny fingers.
As she departed with her daughters, Han turned and saw her
son watching. He waved enthusiastically, cheered by the promise that they would
return soon. Han whipped her head back
immediately. She didn't want him to see her tears.
Scars of a former life
There are no pictures or heirlooms from North Korea in Han's
Virginia apartment today.
Crosses adorn every room -- one hangs from the thermometer,
another sits on atop the TV set, a plastic beaded cross dangles from the
kitchen curtains.
A woman of slight frame, Han wears her wavy black hair in a
careful bun that covers the scars on the left side of her head, where she was
beaten by North Korean soldiers with a wooden rod. The beating shattered the
parietal bone in her skull into four pieces.
Han had been battered, kicked, dragged, lectured and starved
in a country she once called home. Her husband died in police custody. She
mourned the loss of two children who starved to death. She was helpless to
grant the last wish of her mother, who at age 76 died before her eyes, having
sought just one steamed potato.
The images distributed by the Democratic People's Republic
of Korea are often of elaborate military ceremonies, synchronized dancers and
adored leaders. But they belie a harsher truth of food shortages, political
oppression and torture.
North Korea recently agreed to halt its nuclear and missile
program in exchange for U.S. food aid. The deal came in the midst of the country's
first transfer of power in 17 years following the death of Kim Jong II in
December. His 28-year-old son, Kim Jong
Un, is the new leader. But then North Korea announced it would launch a
satellite using ballistic missile technology (a cover-up to test missiles), a
plan that would break the earlier agreement.
Although Han and her daughters live some 7,000 miles away,
they still bear the scars of life back home.
When a country is led by dictators, it is the ordinary people who suffer
and are forced to make gut-wrenching decisions.
Their journey from rural North Korea to a tidy, white-walled
suburban apartment outside Washington -- by way of an underground, 10-year
existence in China -- was tumultuous.
Defectors' stories are often the only way the world learns
about what happens inside the reclusive country. But many who escaped North
Korea choose to remain silent, fearing repercussions for family members left
back home.
Many who do speak out, including Han and her daughters, use
pseudonyms (as they do in this article) to avoid detection by the North Korean
government.
There's no one left to punish, though, when Han and her
daughters talk about their family in North Korea.
They have all starved to death.
Food became scarce in North Korea in the 1990s following the
demise of the Soviet Union, the country's main financial backer, and prolonged
drought.
Han and her family went from getting government rice rations
to foraging for food like hunter-gatherers. They stripped pine trees, plucked
grass and ate every part of each corn plant they could find, including the cob
and the skin -- which they ground into tasteless cakes.
Han grew up in Hamgyong-bukto, singing songs glorifying the
North Korean government.
Han, her mother, her husband and their four children were
living in Hamgyong-bukto, the northernmost province of North Korea.
From birth, North Koreans are taught to work hard and love
their leaders as gods. They learn the Korean alphabet using references to the
country's founder and "Great Leader," Kim Il Sung, and his son,
"Dear Leader" Kim Jong Il. Childhood melodies glorify the state and
the ruling Workers' Party.
"I believed the party kept us alive," Han said.
"I was very thankful. I was constantly trained to believe that without the
party, we wouldn't exist."
She did not doubt the leaders, even as her family went
hungry. It was the United States and South Korea's fault, they were told, that
they had to hunt frogs, rats and even snakes.
They ate virtually anything that moved.
One day, Han discovered five newborn mice beneath a rock;
her mother called them "great medicine." Han cooked the mice, but no matter how long she boiled them,
their pink bodies stayed intact. So she molded the soft lumps onto a spoon and
offered it to her second-youngest child, EunHye, who at 5 was so malnourished
that her black hair had turned yellow and stiff.
"How do you expect a child to eat that?" her
husband, Hak Moon Jo, asked Han. "Would you eat that?"
But EunHye swallowed the spoonful of boiled rodents without
hesitation.
"My heart was torn into shreds," Han said.
All four children's growth was so stunted that their heads
appeared too big for their emaciated bodies. Han's second-eldest child, JinHye,
could count every bone on her rib cage.
The family would try to go to bed at 5 or 6 p.m. because
sleep meant escaping hunger. "You
can't sleep," JinHye recalled. "You think of meat, rice and what it's
like to have food in your stomach. You're constantly thinking of food, so you
lose your mind."
Han could no longer endure it. In 1997, she and her husband decided to cross into China in
search of food. Their plan was to get food from Jo's nephew in China, then
return home to their children. Although it was risky, Han said it was the only
choice.
"I had to feed my kids," she said. "I
couldn't just stand still. I couldn't stand by and watch my kids lay there and
die. We were pulling and eating grass. It was maddening."
The first time Han and her husband snuck into China and hid
at a relatives' home, she got her first glimpse of a rice cooker, full of
steaming, hot white rice.
Han wondered, "Is there a world like this?" There
was no white rice in North Korea, scarcely any electricity and definitely no
rice cookers for ordinary people.
"We didn't have anything," she said.
The trip lasted a week, and they returned home to North
Korea carrying sacks bulging with rice.
Han and her husband would make the journey two more times.
Days after they had returned from their last trip, Jo was
arrested. Han believes they had been seen and reported by a neighbor or
informant.
Han never saw her husband again.
The next day, officers came for her, too. In custody, she
was forced to kneel in front of police, who kicked her, beat her with a wooden
rod and smashed her skull. They lay her hands flat on the cement floor and
stomped on them. But without explaining why, they released her. Han suspects
they may have known she was three months pregnant.
She asked the officers about her husband but got no answers.
She later heard he died on a prisoner train after being forced to stand with
his wrists tied over his head for 10 days without food or water.
Han returned home to a house full of hungry children,
watched by her mother. The rice she and her husband had stashed throughout the
house had been confiscated by police.
Han eventually gave birth to a boy, but he starved to death
two months later. In desperation, Han's eldest daughter left home to find food
for the family, but she disappeared. The family thinks she may have been
trafficked to China. Then Han's mother died.
In less than a year, Han's family of eight had been cut in
half.
A petite woman with chiseled high cheekbones and piercing
eyes, Han is warm, almost motherly to her guests in Virginia. "Cookies?" she asks, offering a
tub of Trader Joe's chocolate chip minis.
Although Han and her girls no longer forage for food -- they
drive their Hyundai to H-mart, a Korean grocery, or Trader Joe's -- life in
America requires a different kind of effort.
Today, Han works overnight shifts, taking care of senior
citizens for a home health care agency. Her life is like that of a suburban
soccer mom, as she juggles rides for her youngest daughter, gets to work, goes
to church and meets demands at home. Exhausted from her nighttime work, she prepares
rice for the girls' dinner and tries to sleep during the day. She rarely sees her children together during
the week because they both work full-time office jobs at the same health care
agency and attend night school.
When Han received training to become a home caregiver for
seniors, she cried, said Eun Kyung Hong, the CEO of CarePeople Home Health. Han
was shocked that a government program like Medicaid provided seniors with
caregivers to help them cook and bathe, and that seniors also received Social
Security. When she learned all this, Han wept and told Hong her mother had
starved to death in North Korea.
About the only time Han's family spends together is when
they head to church. They often spend entire Sundays there, attending Bible
study, worship services and youth groups. JinHye and EunHye exchange texts with
their friends between services. During
prayers, the three women stand together as a unit, praying, clutching their
leather Bibles in their small hands.
"I am so thankful," Han said. "In the U.S.,
it's such a good place. God is good. He's present in our lives." Her daughter, EunHye sums it up: "I was
born in hell, but now live in heaven."
Mrs. Han's choice
In North Korea, after a person is imprisoned, the whole
family is implicated and tarnished. The arrest of Han's husband meant neighbors
and the police were highly suspicious of her family.
On a July night in 1998, two officers came to Han's door and
told the family to leave. If they didn't, the police threatened to burn down
their house. Without a home, she asked
the men, where would she and her children live? How would they survive?
"We did everything for the party, as we were
told," Han said. "The end result was our family died. I could not
believe in North Korea anymore."
The choice was between her country and her children.
"If my kids were to survive, I would have to find my
own way," she said. "As long as we left this country, my kids would
have a chance."
On July 18, Han gathered her three surviving kids -- JinHye,
then 11, EunHye, 7, and BoKum, 5 -- and started an approximate 100-mile walk to
the Chinese border.
Weak from malnutrition and injuries, Han hobbled slowly.
After the first night, they stopped in a village to visit
Han's friend, a widow she trusted. The woman looked at Han's malnourished state
and asked how the family could survive the journey. Two mountain crossings and
the Tumen River lay ahead.
While the youngest girl, EunHye, could walk without help,
her brother BoKum could not. Han and her eldest daughter, JinHye, were both too
weak to carry him.
Han would have to risk the whole family getting caught or
leave her son behind. But how could a mother leave her child?
She took a night to think about it. "I couldn't
sleep," Han said, her mind tossing between two competing thoughts: "I
would have to carry him. How could I carry him?"
The next morning, her friend said, "Leave your son with
me and I will take care of him."
Han agreed, and planned to return in five days to bring him
to China after getting her daughters safely across. In exchange, she promised
to bring the widow rice and food.
As the family parted, BoKum clung to his mother, wrapping
his twiglike arms around her legs. "Why aren't you taking me?" he
asked.
She calmly explained they would get food and return in five
days, just like she and her husband had done before. To soothe him, Han gave
him a ground corn cake.
"I regret that I only gave him one," Han
said. She wonders if things would've
been different if she'd had a second cake to give him.
After two nights of walking, Han and her daughters crossed
into China. There, the family hid in fields and stole squash and corn from
farms. Rains flooded the Tumen River, preventing Han from crossing back. She
couldn't swim.
Then Han heard the government was executing citizens who
hadn't voted for Kim Jong Il in a recent election. Han was among them -- she'd
been in China. There was no way to call
or communicate with the widow taking care of BoKum.
After two months, Han had earned enough cash through small
jobs to hire a man to bring BoKum out of North Korea. But he returned
empty-handed. The boy had been
abandoned by the widow, the man reported. Neighbors spotted BoKum in a field of
reeds, singing a song from a movie that JinHye had taught him. The line he
repeated: "When is mother coming?"
A neighbor gave BoKum a bowl of porridge out of pity. He
died shortly after eating it -- possibly as a result of consuming food too fast
while malnourished. "Refeeding syndrome" was often seen among World
War II prisoners and Holocaust survivors.
When she heard her son was dead, Han said, "My heart
was ripping out of my chest. I was born
in this world and I gave birth to children. I have to help my kids survive --
that's the mission of being parents. If they all die, what's the point of being
born?"
An arduous journey to a new home
Han and her daughters hid in China for 10 years. They stayed
with her husband's relatives, then with acquaintances. They also found help
from Korean missionaries. Han and the girls learned Chinese and imitated locals'
mannerisms to blend in.
They were caught by Chinese authorities and sent back to
North Korea repeatedly -- Han and JinHye four times, EunHye twice. But even in a totalitarian regime, soldiers
along the border are hungry enough to take bribes. The girls were sent to
orphanages and re-education camps, but each time they escaped or bribed their
way back to China.
Han and her daughters became Christians through underground
missionaries during their time in China.
While in China, the family was befriended by Phillip Buck, a
Korean-American pastor and missionary helping North Korean defectors. When the
whole family was repatriated in 2006, Buck paid North Korean security agents
$10,000 to let them escape once more.
This time, after hiding in China for two months, Han and her
daughters went to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Beijing
and asked to live in the United States.
After 16 months of waiting at an apartment provided by
UNHCR, their application was granted and they arrived in the States in 2008.
They were granted asylum and have become permanent U.S. residents.
They first settled in Seattle, where Buck lives, and began
advocating on behalf of North Koreans. But after a year, as their efforts grew,
Han's eldest daughter wanted to live closer to Washington, D.C., where policy
is made. Today, JinHye speaks at
universities and D.C.-area events and and has testified before Congress about
human rights abuses in North Korea.
She told the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission about the
choices her family made when they left North Korea -- and about her brother who
died. "To this day I am so sorry
in my heart for not bringing him with us, and I miss him dearly every
day," she told the panel.
JinHye plans to study theology and become a missionary. She
hopes to preach God's word in North Korea if the country opens up.
Her sister, EunHye, wants to become an international lawyer
to help North Korean defectors. "I
want to help people who do not have rights to be able to speak to the world,
for their freedom and for their dreams," she said. Mild-mannered and studious, EunHye has
Harvard and Princeton pennants taped to the wall in her room. Below them is a
list of the best schools for international law.
Their mother speaks at local Korean-American churches to
raise awareness about abuses in North Korea. The family has joined the outcry
over the forced repatriation of North Korean escapees who are hiding in China.
Han's desire is to raise two educated daughters who will use
their experience in North Korea to help others. Han radiates pride when showing how many books her daughters have
read. JinHye and EunHye both want to devote their time to education, but they
have groceries to buy and rent and bills to pay.
Maybe, Han thinks, there is a reason she and her girls have
survived. "We can talk about what
happened," she said. "All my family in North Korea has died.
I realized God chose us. Other people cannot talk or their
family will suffer."
Commentary:
As I read this story today, I couldn't help but think about the
National Defense Authorization Act Barack Obama signed on New Year's
Eve, which gives him dictatorial power to arrest and detain US citizens indefinitely, without a trial, and the path on which this country is now headed.
Our
great nation, that it has been, was founded on Biblical principles, The
Constitution (which Obama says "needs to be rewritten"), and our
forefathers spilled their precious blood for the freedoms we all enjoy
in America today, at least for now that is.
If
you have a great opinion of North Korea and China, and you enjoy
thinking of the "good old days of East Germany," and you think Hitler
and Stalin were just the greatest, I suppose you will vote for Obama in
November.
However,
if this story angers you and you would like to stop the mayhem in the
world, you might consider starting by helping kick Obama and his
Marxist-Socialist ideas out of our historical White House. You might
remember how he literally made fun of the Bible during his 2008
campaign.
The
member state representatives of the United Nations turn their heads and
look the other way, in that North Korea is a member nation. They have
obviously done nothing to take a stand against North Korea's crimes
against humanity, so where does that put the mindset of the UN, or
rather the UUN (Useless United Nations)? No objection = affirmation.
The
entire world, not just North Korea, China, Russia, Iran and all of
their head-chopping, honor killing, stoning, limb amputating, bombing,
hijacking; Jew, church and Christian burning allies, are in a heap of
trouble - until the Lord returns and executes righteous judgment.
"He
will judge the poor of the people, He will save the children of the
needy and break in pieces the oppressor" Psalms 72:4. This, God has
said He will do and His promises are sure.
Jesus said, "Nation will rise against nation, kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines,
pestilences and earthquakes in various places. All these are the
beginning of sorrows...So, when you see all these things, know that it
(His return) is near, even at the doors" Matthew 24:7, 33.
Whose side are you on? If you are on the wrong side, please visit the How Can I Be Saved page of this website. God bless you.
