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“Is there anybody who has seen my husband? Please inform my husband of our situation and anxieties. I would like to know the address of my husband. Now I have not much time to live. So can I see my husband or even his relatives?”
A desperate letter was delivered to FreeNK Broadcast from an old Rumanian woman missing her husband who was separated from her about 40 years ago.
The very author of the letter is Georgeta Mircioiu, who lives in Rumania. She has ceaselessly sent letters and pictures in earnest to North Korea, as well as to the International Red Cross and Amnesty International, requesting to see her husband.
However, though being desperate to hear the news of her husband, she never did.
The affinity between the old woman, Mircioiu, who is 72 this year and a North Korean man dates back to 54 years ago. Cho Jung Ho, her husband, was a teacher dispatched to lead 3,000 war orphans from North Korea into Rumania in 1952.
The old woman who had just graduated from a college of education came to work as an art teacher at the elementary school where Cho Jung Ho was working. The two passionately loved each other, and they were married with the permission of their respective countries. After a while, they moved to Pyeongyang and settled down in a love nest
She still has precious memories of a diplomatic officials’ apartment at Jung district in Pyongyang city and of kind neighbors and such spicy kimchi the she could not take a bite of it. Their newlywed life was full of happy everyday affairs.
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However, Miran, her 2 year-old daughter, was seized with a serious disease, so she departed from North Korea with her daughter to Rumania in 1962. It was the beginning of the tragedy. After her daughter recovered, she tried to get a visa to go back to North Korea. Yet, the North Korean Embassy at Rumania did not issue the visa.
For a while afterwards, she could hear about the news of her husband through his younger brother, giving and receiving letters. Yet from 1996, it stopped. The last letter she got said that her husband was posted as a teacher at a local school far from Pyongyang, and then sent to a coal mine.
International Couples, NK Forced Them to Be Separated
With “Ending Revisionism” as a slogan in the 1960’s, Kim Il Sung forced North Koreans who were married to foreigners to divorce. Regarding foreigners, Kim Il Sung either expelled them or did not permit them to go back into North Korea for various, illogical reasons, while the remaining spouses were enforced to be sent to collieries by reason of being revolutionary objects.
The letter of her husband said that, “I am working in a colliery for my nation and Party.” Yet, the old woman Mircioiu felt guilty for this, thinking it was because he was married to her.
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The old woman visited the North Korean Embassy every month to hear about her husband. She ceaselessly requested the North Korean Embassy to allow her to see him if alive, or affirm his ashes if dead.
However, each response of the North Korean Embassy was different, for example, the first one being ‘death’, later ‘massing’, or ‘living’, and again ‘death’.
The old woman Mircioiu is saying that she has never regretted marrying her husband. Waiting for her husband during her life, she has lived only with her daughter. Having not much time to live, the old woman is even now writing a letter to her husband, waiting for him to come back.
