North Korean Defectors

Haggadah Section: Maggid - Beginning

Consider this story about a girl who ran away from North Korea, a country where everyone there is essentially slaves and oppressed.  Courtesy of Al-Jazeera

"'Where are you going at this time?' she asked.

'Just to a friend's house,' I said, without looking at her. 'I'll be back in a few hours.'

She put on her own coat and walked me out to the front gate holding a kerosene lamp.

'Don't stay out too long. Come home quickly.'

She smiled at me.

Over the years to come, I could never shake the memory of that moment and the look on her face in the glow of the lamp. I saw love in her eyes. Her face showed complete trust in me."

Hyeonseo Lee, from The Girl With Seven Names

It was a cold winter's evening when, without so much as telling her mother, 17-year-old Park Min-Young fled her country.

She knew it was too dangerous to let anyone know of her plans. For, in North Korea, she had learned to trust no one – not family, not friends. Everyone spied on everyone else.

"At the last minute, I really wanted to say to her that I am leaving the country," she recalls, almost two decades later. "The emotions were very strange."

Her hometown, Hyesan, was close to the border with China. Only the Yalu River separated the two countries.

On the other side of the border was the Chinese city of Changbai. Its bright lights fascinated her and she wanted to visit. Her family traded with Chinese there, so Park had befriended many North Korean guards. That made it easier for her to cross the heavily militarised border.

When she first stepped on to the thin ice of the frozen river, she imagined that she would return home in a matter of days. But she never did. And, just a few steps later, she was in China.

"I didn't know then that this would be my very last time in my homeland, nor did I know that I would be separated from my mum and family for a very long time."

The three Kims

The three Kims - Kim Il-Sung, Kim Jong-Il and now Kim Jong-Un - have ruled North Korea since the end of World War II. It is a country from which very few escape and into which very little of the outside world seeps.

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