[imText1]“After some thought, one POW leaped at the man (guard) and struck him on the head with a rock. ‘Ahh!’ the guard roared in pain, and the other fellow guards opened fire at POWs in an instant. There were eight of them. As they fired indiscriminately, the POWs about one hundred and fifty struggled to untie their hands to escape. Many were killed including two guards.”
A memoir has been published which records the experiences of former POWs and remaining five hundred POWs still locked up in North Korea. A former POW, Huh Jae Suk, who escaped from North Korea in 2000 authored the memoir under the title “They Called Me the Sly One (One Book’s).”
On April 18, Citizen’s Coalition for Human Rights of Abductees and North Korean Refugees celebrated the publication of the memoir and the seventh anniversary of the founding of the organization at the Seoul Foreign Correspondents’ Club of the Korea Press Center. Mr. Huh’s book is the second memoir ever written by POWs of the Korean War. The first one was authored by the late lieutenant Cho Chang Ho and published in 1995 with the title, “the Returned Dead (Shinwon Books, in 1996)”
At the celebration, Mr. Huh said, “I know I won’t live that long. So, I had to write this book because I want the world especially the young to know about how much suffering we have gone through in North Korea.”
Mr. Huh confessed that it was no easy job to publish the memoir. He said, “Many former POWs have been reluctant to hold a press conference and speak out about their experiences in North Korea because they did not want to put at risk the well being of their families left behind in North Korea.”
Mr. Huh said that he named the memoir as such because he had been always addressed by the pejorative name “the Sly One,” when he served his prison term at a North Korean mining camp and later lived as a member of the lowest class in North Korea.
The memoir details his hellish experiences at the Aoji mine camp in Kyungheung of North Hamkyung Province and records what he had witnessed and gone through in his 47 years of life in North Korea.
The memoir recounts some heinous crimes taken place in North Korea amid food and economic crisis. According to one account, in 1998, an owner of a noodle shop in Eundeok of North Hamkyung Province killed and butchered three children and sold their flesh as meat.
Mr. Huh criticized the passive attitude of the South Korean government regarding the POW issue, saying “The president and ministers should know that they can perform their duties because the army defends this country. If the government fails to take care of POWs, who would ever pick up a rifle to defend the country? ”
Mr. Huh continued, “Things have gotten off on the wrong track in the South Korean government. It sent back 63 long term political prisoners, who had not convert their communist’s ideology into South Korea’s one, to North Korea and continues to give food aid to the country. However, it has never spoken for POWs and those abducted to North Korea!”
