Cascades of tears. Lingering hugs. Family photos. And questions that have burned unanswered for decades. For the first time in three years, North and South…
Cascades of tears. Lingering hugs. Family photos. And questions that have burned unanswered for decades.
For the first time in three years, North and South Korea are holding family reunions, allowing a small number of South Koreans to travel across the fortified border to the North to reunite with loved ones they haven’t seen since the 1950s.
Such reunions have been held intermittently since the ’80s, and have resumed as relations between the North and South are thawing.
For the families involved, it’s an extraordinary moment. In general, there is no contact permitted between North Koreans and South Koreans, and many members of separated families do not even know if their relatives across the border are still alive.
The Associated Press reported from Seoul:
« The 92-year-old South Korean woman wept and stroked the wrinkled cheeks of her 71-year-old North Korean son on Monday, their first meeting since they were driven apart during the turmoil of the 1950-53 Korean War.
» ‘How many children do you have? Do you have a son?’ Lee Keum-seom asked her son Ri Sang Chol during their long-awaited encounter at the North’s Diamond Mountain resort….
« Hugging the woman he’d last seen when he was 4, Ri showed his mother a photo of her late husband, who had stayed behind in North Korea with him after being separated from his wife while fleeing south. ‘Mother, this is how my father looked,’ Ri said.
« Before leaving for North Korea, Lee said she wanted to ask her son ‘how he grew up without his mom and how his father raised him.’
Many of the reunions involve elderly family members reuniting with siblings; few parents are still living to be reunited with their children.
