MUST SEE: BBC / Chosun Ilbo Video on North Korean Refugees in China
In the brilliant sunlight of an icy February day, the camera takes us onto the frozen river. A female figure lies, face down, hip raised in the classic pose of a reclining beauty, a North Korean woman – fully dressed – who fell while crossing.
Like a sculpture cast in bronze, nameless, iconic, she is a monument to all the fallen who went unfilmed, their deaths unremarked.
The Chinese guide who has brought the crew to see her has seen it all before.
He kicks her foot.
“Rock hard,” he says and relieves himself nearby.
Her body lay there for three weeks until the ice melted and she was washed away. [BBC, Olenka Frenkiel]
The video is from the Chosun Ilbo series “On the Border,” of which I’ve seen brief excerpts, including the shivering man described in this BBC article who was smuggling heroin. The BBC producer, Olenka Frenkiel, is the same one who brought us the documentary “Access to Evil,” in which former concentration camp guard Kwon Hyuk described the death of a whole family in a gas chamber at Camp 22. The product this time is no less exceptional. It’s the most emotionally moving thing I’ve seen for at least a year.
This short segment of video manages to capture humanity at its most callous and infuriating, and at its most inspiring. It may have been the love and determination of a North Korean mother, strugging to bring her handicapped child to South Korea for treatment, that moved me the most. Don’t miss this one. And remember that none of these people would be suffering and dying this way were it not for the collaborative brutality of the Chinese and North Korean dictatorships.
There are other, shorter segments of footage here and here.
(Another big hat tip to reader and blogger usinkorea)
Updated exactly one year ago, the BBC’s “Dangerous path to flee North Korea” and “Desperate plight of North Koreans” is still current…unfortunately.