In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom

by Yeonmi Park

When you have so little, just the smallest thing can make you happy—and that is one of the very few features of life in North Korea that I actually miss.

My grandfather kept his civil service job all through World War II. After the Japanese surrendered on August 15, 1945, the Soviet army swept into the northern part of Korea, while the American military took charge of the South—and this set the stage for the agony my country has endured for more than seventy years. An arbitrary line was drawn along the 38th parallel, dividing the peninsula into two administrative zones: North and South Korea. The United States flew an anti-Communist exile named Syngman Rhee into Seoul and ushered him into power as the first president of the Republic of Korea. In the North, Kim Il Sung, who had by then become a Soviet major, was installed as leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or DPRK.

The Soviets quickly rounded up all eligible men to establish a North Korean military force. My grandfather was taken from his job at city hall and turned into an officer in the People’s Army. By 1949, both the United States and the Soviet Union had withdrawn their troops and turned the peninsula over to the new puppet leaders. It did not go well. Kim Il Sung was a Stalinist and an ultranationalist dictator who decided to reunify the country in the summer of 1950 by invading the South with Russian tanks and thousands of troops. In North Korea, we were taught that the Yankee imperialists started the war, and our soldiers gallantly fought off their evil invasion. In fact, the United States military returned to Korea for the express purpose of defending the South—bolstered by an official United Nations force—and quickly drove Kim Il Sung’s army all the way to the Yalu River, nearly taking over the country. They were stopped only when Chinese soldiers surged across the border and fought the Americans back to the 38th parallel.

By the end of this senseless war, at least three million Koreans had been killed or wounded, millions were refugees, and most of the country was in ruins. In 1953, both sides agreed to end the fighting, but they never signed a peace treaty. To this day we are still officially at war, and both the governments of the ...

The United States dropped more bombs on North Korea than it had during the entire Pacific campaign in World War II. The Americans bombed every city and village, and they kept bombing until there were no major buildings left to destroy. Then they bombed the dams to flood the crops. The damage was unimaginable, and nobody knows how many civilians were killed and maimed.

If I had to accept Christ as my savior to get to South Korea, then I was going to be the best Christian these people had ever seen.

I had no trouble grasping the concept of an all-powerful, all-knowing God. It was a lot like what we had been taught in North Korea about our Dear Leader, who knew everything and would take care of everything for us if we were loyal to him. But I had trouble understanding how He was a merciful God. I wondered why this God existed in South Korea but not in North Korea.

“No, you are sinners. And I cannot allow you to go to Mongolia in a sinful state. You will put all the innocent ones at risk.”

my mother and I had decided we were not going to be taken. My mother had stashed away a large cache of sleeping pills—the same kind my grandmother had used to kill herself. I hid a razor blade in the belt of my tweed jacket so that I could slit my own throat before they sent me back to North Korea.

my vision wider, and my emotions less shallow. The vocabulary in South Korea was so much richer than the one I had known, and when you have more words to describe the world, you increase your ability to think complex thoughts.