Many of us now look back on our youthful political enthusiasms with some bemusement. Few will have had to pay such a heavy price. The story of Oh Kil-nam:
The self-acknowledged foolishness of Oh began in Germany in 1985.
He was married with two young daughters and studying for a doctoral degree in economics at the University of Tuebingen. He was also an outspoken and left-leaning opponent of the authoritarian government then running South Korea.
His activism attracted the attention of North Korean agents, who approached Oh and offered help with a family medical problem. His wife, Shin Sook-ja, a South Korean nurse, was sick with hepatitis. The North Koreans convinced Oh that she would get free first-class treatment in Pyongyang and he would get a good government job.
Via East Germany and Moscow, the family arrived in Pyongyang on Dec. 3, 1985, Oh said, and was immediately taken to nearby mountains for indoctrination at a military camp.
"The moment we stepped into that camp, I knew my wife was right and that I had made the wrong decision," Oh said.
His wife received no treatment for hepatitis. Instead, she and her husband spent several months studying the teachings of Kim Il Sung, the "Great Leader" and founding dictator of North Korea. He died in 1994 and was replaced by his son, Kim Jong Il, who continues to run what is often called the most repressive state on earth.
Oh and his wife were given jobs working in a radio station broadcasting propaganda to South Korea. Soon, though, authorities ordered Oh to return to Germany and recruit more South Korean students to live in North Korea. His wife and daughters, he was told, could not go along. Oh recalls that he and his wife argued bitterly about what he should do.
"She hit me in the face when I said I would come back with some South Koreans," Oh said. "She said I could not have that on my conscience. She told me to leave North Korea and never come back. She told me to think of her and our daughters as being dead from a car accident."
En route to Germany, Oh turned himself over to authorities in Copenhagen and was granted political asylum. He was debriefed for several weeks in Munich, he said, by U.S. agents from the CIA.
Shortly after Oh defected, his wife and daughters were detained in Pyongyang and taken to Camp 15, a former North Korean prisoner told Amnesty International. Two years later, according to another former prisoner, the three were moved from a "rehabilitation" section of the camp, where prisoners are sometimes released, to a "complete control district," where they work until they die.
There has been no further information about Oh's wife and daughters since then.
That was written in February last year. Now Oh has heard that his wife and daughters are alive, after 25 years in the North Korean camps....
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