Words that Never Leave You: “It is like heaven. I don’t believe I live here.”
Part Thirty-Seven in an ongoing series from Hollie's book "Words That Never Leave You: Fifty Pearls of Wisdom and Reflection from Survivors Across the World."
Jun Heo was barely a teenager when he was sent to one of North Korea’s concentration camps. He was beaten black and blue and routinely tortured within an inch of his life. He remembers the dank smell, the vision of about twenty terrified humans stuffed into each small cell, and how the men and women were separated – except for the women detained with their infant sons. Everyone over the age of seventeen endured hard labor in farms from 6:30 a.m. until at least 8 p.m. Cries and screams became life's soundtrack. But it was after nightfall when the most excruciating howls reverberated.
Hapless prisoners, trying to sleep, would wail in pain as their bony bodies broke down from starvation, while at midnight, the “secret police” came to take women to be raped. Heo’s crime? He had defected to China for a chance at a better life, only to be discovered and returned to the dragon’s lair of his homeland.
After several months in detention, North Korean authorities freed him. But a few years later, at seventeen, a determined Heo defected again – this time for good. Now a 26-year-old political science major at Seoul National University and studying English at the Teach North Korean Refugees Center, he wakes up daily with a self-inflicted pinch.
“It is like heaven,” Heo whispered. “I don’t believe I live here.”
That moment of gratitude, the beauty of a safe space, the opportunity to exist in a parcel of freedom and thriving we too often take for granted.
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