The Hard Way Out

• Share

Cho Chang Ho, 63, has been to hell and lived to tell about it. The South Korean army lieutenant was reported killed in action during the Korean War, and he had been forgotten, even by his family. But all those years Cho was alive in North Korea. Last week he finally made it home and recounted his story in a tearful hospital reunion with his sisters and brother in Seoul. He says he was captured by Chinese soldiers and forced to fight in the North Korean army. When he tried to escape, he was sentenced to 12 years in a notorious gulag where so many inmates died of hunger, cold and beatings, he said, that "no one wept, no one expressed sorrow, no one asked how anyone died." After his release in 1964, he was sent to a coal mine, where he worked 13 years, until the dust ruined his lungs. From then on, after marrying and raising three children, he lived on meager rations and edible roots in a remote village near the Chinese frontier.

Two years ago, his children grown, Cho began studying how to escape. He befriended a Chinese smuggler and on the night of Oct. 3 stole to the banks of the Yalu River, where he met the smuggler and his well-hidden boat. A driving rain cloaked their escape from the numerous watchtowers and patrols, and in 10 silent minutes they rowed across to China. There he made his way to the port city of Dalian, where he found another Chinese smuggler, who transported him to South Korean authorities.

Cho joined a growing number of North Koreans who have risked their lives to cross the world's last cold-war frontiers, including the dangerous strip along the country's northern border with China and Russia. But the perils of flight have begun to look less daunting as economic conditions in the North deteriorate and word spreads of a better life elsewhere. Yo Man Chul, 48, an out-of-favor police captain, slipped across the frozen Tumen River on a dark night with his wife, two sons and daughter. When he finally arrived in South Korea, he said, "I thought there was no difference between dying while fleeing or dying by starvation."

This year 46 defectors reached South Korea, up from eight last year, and hundreds more are still in parts of China and Russia close to North Korea, taking shelter with large Korean communities there. China and Russia turn a blind eye toward the runaways, and South Korean diplomats in Beijing and Vladivostok sometimes help them, but many rely on a rudimentary underground run by Korean ethnics. There is as yet no wholesale stampede from the North similar to what happened in the last days of East Germany, but any openings like the agreement two weeks ago between Washington and Pyongyang just might give potential defectors an extra push. The refugees make good propaganda for South Korea, which stages press conferences for new arrivals and keeps them under close observation for several months to help them adjust to their new life and ensure that they are not double agents.