SEOUL, South Korea — After the Korean War ended in 1953, Kim Myeong Bok and 75 other North Korean prisoners of war detained in South Korea opted to live abroad rather than risk hostile welcomes in either half of their homeland.
Now Kim wants to come home, although he might find little more than rejection and suspicion.
Amid the Koreas’ intense Cold War rivalry, the POWs were labeled traitors, opportunists or fence-sitters. The fates of several North Korean POWs who voluntarily returned home are unknown. Many others have died abroad, and now fewer than a dozen are thought to be alive.
Kim, 79 and living in Brazil, is trying to return to his North Korean hometown, at the arrangement of a movie director who is making a documentary on him and his fellow ex-POWs.
He doesn’t have North Korea’s approval yet and might never get it, although he will at least visit the South. He knows this is probably his last chance to try to go home.
“I’ve missed my parents a lot, particularly my mother, who took me to a church and told me to believe in Jesus Christ,” Kim said, speaking from the remote Brazilian city of Cuiaba during a recent video interview. “I want to go to the place where my church stood, but it must have been pulled down by now.”
Kim and most of the other POWs who left the Korean Peninsula settled in South America. None could have expected that their homeland would remain so bitterly divided for so long. With an armistice signed but not a peace treaty, the peninsula remains technically at war.
They left for many reasons: to avoid the North’s harsh systems, to enjoy religious freedom, to build up professional careers. Many feared execution in the North for having been held captive in the South.
“We are not against North Korea, but the situation was very critical and miserable, so we left Korea and went to other countries, and we are so anxious to meet our relatives,” said an 86-year-old ex-POW living in San Francisco. He asked to be identified only by his initials — H.T. — out of concern for any living relatives he might have in the North.
Former POWs have been forgotten in South Korea, but many who recall their stories now view them as victims of the war and the ensuing Korean division.
