Kang Myung Sook, 87, lives in a nursing home in rural South Korea, about 32 kilometers from the border with North Korea. The last time she saw her brother was in 2002, when she was 63, during a family reunion program organized by the two governments.
For two days, the siblings sat across from each other in a banquet hall at a North Korean resort, surrounded by hundreds of other families trying to compress 50 years of separation into a few short hours, with government officials monitoring every word. When buses arrived to take families back to their respective sides, Kang recalled: “My brother called out from the window of the moving bus, telling me to take care. Everyone was crying—it was utter chaos. And then we never saw each other again.”
According to official data, about 34,000 living South Koreans are registered as separated from families in North Korea after the Korean War—a fraction of the 134,500 people who have registered since 1988, when the government began keeping records. More than 100,000 others have died.
However, this list only counts those who applied, mainly to participate in the now-suspended reunion program. The real number is much larger: descendants, distant relatives, childhood friends, and defectors—people who still have some connection to someone across the border.
This story is about two of them: a woman who has waited nearly 75 years for the war between the two Koreas to truly end, and a young man who crossed the dividing line—twice—to bring the last remaining family member out.
