“I always thought he had died and mourned for his death, but he’s alive, so I’m happy with that”, a 85-year-old South Korean Lee Soon-gyu said, who met her North Korean husband.
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The separated family members took part in a reunion held in North Korea’s Diamond Mountain resort.
North Korea and South Korea agreed last month to allow North Koreans to briefly reunite with South Korean family members.
Lee Dong-im, 94, who is to be reunited with her brother-in-law, said before the reunions that she was “choked with tears”.
“I had a lot of things I wanted to ask, like about how my father and mother had lived before they died, but I couldn’t because I had to be sensitive about everything”, Jeon said.
The United States and the Soviet Union drew that line across the Korean Peninsula at the end of World War II, intending it to be temporary.
Because the Korean conflict concluded with an armistice rather than a peace treaty, the two Koreas technically remain at war and direct exchanges of letters or telephone calls are prohibited.
The Korean war, which erupted 65 years ago, abruptly separated parents from their children, husbands from their wives, and siblings from one another. Most of the participants are in their 70s and 80s. He added families from both sides avoided speaking about sensitive topics including ideology or politics. In a typical piece of propaganda, Pyongyang published a report about the reunions through its state media that said the North Korean participants explained to their South Korean relatives how their lives have been “happy” and “worthwhile” under the North’s socialist system. “I later learned that most of the other South Koreans gave about $1,000 to their relatives”.
The whole event is governed by a strict set of rules, which were drilled into the families during an information session Monday.
North Korean border guards closely checked the belongings of South Korean visitors, including the laptops of South Korean reporters, during the customs and quarantine procedures that took about one hour. Citing South Korea’s intelligence agency, Lee assured journalists on Tuesday that North Korea was still not able to miniaturize nuclear weapons-a key step to building nuclear missiles. Electronics, books, expensive watches and second-hand goods were all banned.
The North’s official Rodong Sinmun on Wednesday reported, “The occasion of the reunions where families finally met – a scene often envisioned following the tragic fragmentation of the same people because of foreign powers – brought joy and a yearning for unification”.
They also had lunch together at a condo-style edifice, dubbed a “meeting place for separated families”, next to the hotel.
They remember their brother fondly.
The two reportedly hadn’t seen each other since the man was just a year old. “I don’t even remember how she looked as a baby”.
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Information for this article was contributed by Yoonjung Seo of The Washington Post.
