An elderly ethnic Korean couple protected them for months. But the stress proved too much to bear, and one day they sent the kids off to a nearby market. A member of a Japan-based human-rights group, who had been supporting them, set them up in a tiny apartment, where I visited them again in 1999.
On that trip I carried with me two sturdy backpacks. I had decided that I would have to help them, somehow, to escape; they would need bags to carry their few possessions. We talked for hours under a dim light. “We cannot go back to North Korea. We cannot live in China either,” Chun-shik, then 15, said. “We have no place to go in this world.” “Could you take us to South Korea?” his 13-year-old sister asked me. “Can you give us a little hope?”
I promised them I would try. I spent many sleepless nights wondering if I was doing the right thing. But in the end, I decided I could not abandon them. As a reporter I could only tell their story. As an individual, I found I could do more.
I began to study possible means of rescuing the pair. On quick weekend trips to cities around the region, I scoped out routes and risks. I called the kids often from my kitchen in Tokyo, telling them to be ready to move whenever I gave the word. Last summer I finally managed to slip them onto a plane to Seoul.
That was the happiest goodbye I’ve ever said. I still wonder how it can be a crime to help children like Chun-shik and Son-hee. Isn’t ignoring them a greater crime?
