As a teenager in North Korea, Lee Soon-keum bitterly resented her prisoner-of-war father as his status meant she would have to toil in coal mines like him.
Years later, she says she was forced to watch him and her brother executed by firing squad.
After the Korean War ended in 1953, North Korea kept tens of thousands of the South's captured troops, putting them to work in its mines and construction sites.
Escapees and activists say their descendants have inherited their fate, condemned to labour digging coal -- a major earner for Pyongyang until sanctions blocked exports.
Growing up in Kyonghung in the country's far northwest, Lee knew from an early age that -- like almost all POW daughters -- she would be sent to the mines for seven years after she left school.
"When I was 13, I found out that my father was a POW and I really resented him for it," she said.
"I asked him why he didn't get killed in the war so that he wouldn't have met my mother and given birth to us."
Lee, who defected to the South in 2010 and now lives in Seoul, told AFP that her father's longing to return to his South Korean home town of Pohang proved his undoing.
He regularly sang its praises to her and her siblings, telling them that they would be welcomed there as "the children of a hero" when the peninsula was reunified.
But her brother -- also assigned to work in the mine -- repeated his boasts at a drinking session with workmates, one of whom reported them to authorities.
One evening six months later, security personnel arrived at the family home and dragged away Lee's brother. A few weeks later they returned for her father.
She heard nothing more, until one day guards took her -- without explanation -- to a patch of wasteland by a bridge where a crowd had been assembled.
A jeep arrived carrying the two men, who looked weak and as if they had been beaten.
"My brother had shrunk like a child and my father had dried up like a twig," Lee said.
An official denounced them as traitors before they were tied to two posts set up in the earth.
Teams of three executioners shot both of them dead.
Lee's mind has blocked out the moment when they were killed, but she locked eyes with her father in the last seconds of his life, and breaks down at the memory.
"As my father stared at me," she said, "it seemed like he was telling me to go back to his hometown."
As a teenager in North Korea, Lee Soon-keum bitterly resented her prisoner-of-war father as his status meant she would have to toil in coal mines like him.
Years later, she says she was forced to watch him and her brother executed by firing squad.
After the Korean War ended in 1953, North Korea kept tens of thousands of the South’s captured troops, putting them to work in its mines and construction sites.
Escapees and activists say their descendants have inherited their fate, condemned to labour digging coal — a major earner for Pyongyang until sanctions blocked exports.
Growing up in Kyonghung in the country’s far northwest, Lee knew from an early age that — like almost all POW daughters — she would be sent to the mines for seven years after she left school.
“When I was 13, I found out that my father was a POW and I really resented him for it,” she said.
“I asked him why he didn’t get killed in the war so that he wouldn’t have met my mother and given birth to us.”
Lee, who defected to the South in 2010 and now lives in Seoul, told AFP that her father’s longing to return to his South Korean home town of Pohang proved his undoing.
He regularly sang its praises to her and her siblings, telling them that they would be welcomed there as “the children of a hero” when the peninsula was reunified.
But her brother — also assigned to work in the mine — repeated his boasts at a drinking session with workmates, one of whom reported them to authorities.
One evening six months later, security personnel arrived at the family home and dragged away Lee’s brother. A few weeks later they returned for her father.
She heard nothing more, until one day guards took her — without explanation — to a patch of wasteland by a bridge where a crowd had been assembled.
A jeep arrived carrying the two men, who looked weak and as if they had been beaten.
“My brother had shrunk like a child and my father had dried up like a twig,” Lee said.
An official denounced them as traitors before they were tied to two posts set up in the earth.
Teams of three executioners shot both of them dead.
Lee’s mind has blocked out the moment when they were killed, but she locked eyes with her father in the last seconds of his life, and breaks down at the memory.
“As my father stared at me,” she said, “it seemed like he was telling me to go back to his hometown.”
