A New Home: Korean Orphans in Poland During the 1950s

children-gone-to-poland-.jpg, default, Still from the film 'Children Sent to Poland', directed by Choo Sang-mi, photo: WFDiF/producer's press materials

#film

The story told by Chu Sang-mi of North Korean orphans who found refuge in the Polish People’s Republic in the 1950s is a harrowing tale about large-scale historical events that shatter ordinary people’s lives and the silent victims of political conflicts. It is also about the role that humanity can play in overcoming cultural and political barriers.

'Korea is burning.' These are the words that began the 5th edition of the Polish Film Chronicle in 1951. Then the voice of Andrzej Łapicki could be heard saying:

MacArthur’s soldiers, beaten by the People’s Army and Chinese volunteers, are venting their impotent rage on the defenceless population. Tens of thousands of Korean children are homeless. It is our duty to help these children – these innocent victims of American bestiality. The Polish Committee of Defenders of Peace has begun a nationwide collection of offerings and donations for Korean children. (…) The trinity of peace will come to you, too. Prepare what you can! Let Korean children know that there exists a powerful, growing world of peace, joyful work and brotherhood alongside the dying world of crime, evil and transgression.

One year later, another Polish Film Chronicle once again reminded the public about Korean orphans. Projected on cinema screens was the face of a sleeping Korean girl anxiously tossing and turning on her bed. Then the scene cut to harrowing wartime images – buildings on fire, corpses lying in the streets and bombs falling, while Andrzej Łapicki narrated:

Rest easy, child. It was just a terrible dream. There’s no danger for you here. You’re among friends. After being torn away from their homes by the war, 200 Korean children have come to Poland, and they’re being cared for lovingly here. These are orphans whose parents were murdered by the Americans and Syngman Rhee’s men [Syngman Rhee was the president of South Korea – editor’s note]. These children won’t experience fear or hunger with us. We’ll teach them to laugh again and believe that people can be brothers to one another.

Aid for the children

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

Still from the film 'Children Sent to Poland', directed by Choo Sang-mi, photo: WFDiF/producer's press materials

Picture image

children-gone-to-poland-2.jpg

1,500 Korean children were transported to Poland (most of them in 1953), the oldest of whom were 14 years old at the time. They were orphans, victims of the war that North Korea had declared against its US-backed southern neighbour in June 1950. The bloody conflict, which lasted three years, was one of the proxy wars of the Cold War period, in which the geopolitical powers of the United States and the Soviet Union were measured against each other. Poland, then in the Soviet sphere of influence, eagerly joined the propaganda mission to help North Korean victims.

The Polish Film Chronicle newsreels and Trybuna Ludu newspaper reported on the Korean children, Marian Brandys dedicated his socialist realist novel Dom odzyskanego dzieciństwa [The House of Regained Childhood] to them, and integration excursions were organized to Otwock, where the first two hundred Korean guests were staying. In 1956, Kim Il-sung himself, the leader of North Korea, visited Warsaw. He was welcomed at the airport by the most prominent Polish politicians - Cyrankiewicz, Ochab and Rokossowski - and every step taken by the Korean demigod was followed by the Polish and foreign media.

But the truth about Korean orphans was a bit more complicated than its depiction in propaganda. The vast majority of them ended up in Lwówek Śląski. They arrived there only in 1953 - not from Korea, but from deep in Russia, where they’d been held in appalling conditions. When the Korean War was drawing to an end, Soviet leaders decided to relocate them to Poland in order to help them grow stronger and healthier.

When they got off the trains in Lwówek Śląski, they evoked pity. They were sickly and infested with parasites, and they had to be treated by local doctors before they could start a normal life. Soon the small town of Lwówek Śląski had become their second home.

Jolanta Krysowata, author of the book Skrzydło anioła: historia tajnego ośrodka dla koreańskich sierot [The Wing of an Angel: The Story of a Secret Center for Korean Orphans] and film footage depicting their fate, described the place as

a kind of Magic Mountain, an enclave, a excluded area next to a sleepy town near the German border.

No one wanted to live there and few ventured into the place at all. That’s why Lwówek Śląski was chosen as the place where the Korean orphans would live. Over time, their stay in Lwówek Śląski was shrouded by an increasingly dense layer of secrets and insinuations.

A new home

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

Still from the film 'Children Sent to Poland', directed by Choo Sang-mi, photo: WFDiF/producer's press materials

Picture image

the-childen-gone-to-poland-kadr-z-filmu.jpg

Initially, however, the communist government rose to the challenge. Over 8 million złoty were spent on setting up the centre, and its maintenance cost another 6.3 million. Over the years, the Korean children were cared for by nearly 600 employees. Cooks, teachers, educators and doctors made sure that the little guests felt at home there. They lacked nothing - at least as much as was possible in Poland during the 1950s. All that was lacking, perhaps, were the delicacies familiar to them from their native country.

In a report written about the Lwówek Śląski orphans, former educator Stanisław Wachal recalled:

When we went on excursions into the forest, you know what they ate? Ferns. They could have poisoned themselves with them! But this was their custom and these ferns were a delicacy for them. We had to follow them everywhere to make sure they didn’t poison themselves with this weed.

The children quickly learned Polish, and the best method to integrate them turned out to be sports - soccer was an excellent means of uniting the Polish and Korean children. The latter called the educators ‘mom’ and ‘dad’, and their relationships developed over time into very deep, personal bonds.

But the Korean government kept an eye on them all the time - it was at Pyongyang’s political direction that the children were taken to screenings of Soviet and Korean propaganda films. They had to remember where their homeland really was. After all, a duty to serve the North Korean government awaited them. Benon Oleksiak, one of the teachers from Lwówek Śląski, recalled in an interview with Jolanta Krysowata:

If someone said 'Kim Il-sung', they weren’t allowed to sit down. Those who heard the leader’s name had to stand to attention.

The Korean educators made sure their pupils were raised to be tough, loyal citizens. The Polish staff were forbidden from touching the children or giving them ‘too much’ affection. In an interview with Tygodnik Powszechny, Jolanta Krysowata said,

A hairdresser who cut the Korean children’s hair told me she couldn’t help herself and hugged them. But it wasn’t allowed. Then the children would come to her on purpose, because they knew she would hug them after the haircut. They couldn’t wait for their hair to grow back.

Winds of change

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

Still from the film 'Children Sent to Poland', directed by Choo Sang-mi, photo: WFDiF/producer's press materials

Picture image

dzieci_wyslane_do_polski_2.jpg

The political situation that had brought them to Poland was the cause of another tragedy that befell them. In 1959, the North Korean government decided to immediately return the war orphans to their homeland. No one asked their opinion - they were simply packed into trains and transported back to North Korea. Most didn’t want to return; they pretended to be ill in order to avoid traveling to Pyongyang, and young children lay down in the snow to get pneumonia and delay the moment of departure. This was of little use. By August 1959, there was almost no trace of them in Poland.

A sad fate awaited them in their homeland. Accustomed to relative freedom, in North Korea they found themselves caught in the cogs of a heartless system. What’s more - many of their peers and guardians viewed the newcomers from Poland as foreign entities. They were sent away to do forced labour.

They wrote about their misery in letters to their Polish ‘moms’ and ‘dads’. They asked them to send souvenirs from Poland and complained about everyday life in North Korea. One girl, in a letter to her ‘mom’, asked to be sent a Polish edition of Robinson Crusoe so she wouldn’t forget the language she’d learned in her second home.

In a dramatic letter to his ‘dad’, one of the children wrote:

Dear Dad, I’ve been thinking about Poland for a long time and so I’ve been dreaming of escaping from here. Don’t be angry, Dad. Prepare a Merry Christmas for me. Here, where I am, there will be no such times as Merry Christmas. Dad, don’t tell anyone about this, because after crossing that border, life was hard for me. They locked us up there, and they shouted at us for ten days. Then with the militia we went back to school and there was shouting again. Now I’m being trained to work in a mine.

One of the other boys raised in Lwówek Śląski, who had already become known in Poland as a born fugitive, tried to escape from North Korea to Poland as many as three times. He ended up drowning in the swamps near the border.

Saved from oblivion

Video embed

Children Gone To Poland - Korean Documentary - Main Trailer

In 1961, their stories came to a halt. The Korean government issued a ban on correspondence, and letters between the educators in Lwówek Śląski and their Korean ‘children’ stopped being sent.

The fate of the Korean orphans would have remained one of the many mysteries of that era if it hadn’t been for Jolanta Krysowata, a journalist, writer and documentary filmmaker who came across the story of the Korean children many years ago and decided to tell the world about them.

It began with a mysterious grave. At the Osobowice Cemetery in Wrocław, Krysowata’s friend, film director Patrick Yoka, saw the gravestone of 13-year-old Kim Ki Dok, a Korean girl who died in 1955. Together with Jolanta Krysowata, he began researching the case, and eventually they discovered the forgotten story of the North Korean children from Lwówek Śląski. Krysowata dedicated her book Skrzydło anioła [The Wing of an Angel], a radio report titled Osieroceni [Orphaned] and the documentary film Kim Ki Dok [Made with Yoka] to them. She has become an ambassador of remembrance for the victims of the Korean War.

In 2018, the story she uncovered intrigued Chu Sang-mi, a South Korean film director and actress, who chronicled the fate of the North Korean orphans in the documentary film Dzieci wysłane do Polski [The Children Sent to Poland]. For her, too, their story became part of her own personal experience.

Chu Sang-mi, an acclaimed and popular South Korean actress, decided to change her life after twenty years of acting. After giving birth to a child, she fell into postpartum depression. And when she saw footage of the condition in which street children were living in North Korea, she decided to tell the world about their misery. She had hit upon a topic that soon became an obsession for her.

When she became aware of the story of the North Korean orphans sent to Poland, Chu Sang-mi wanted to make a feature film telling their story. She began writing a script and looking for actors to play the main roles. However, she soon changed her mind and opted for a documentary form. She wanted to tell the story of the love that united the Polish educators and their Asian wards, but also the war trauma that they shared. After all, for the Polish caregivers who themselves had experienced World War II, taking care of war orphans was a kind of subconscious self-therapy. Thanks to her collaboration with Jolanta Krysowata, the South Korean director was able to make contact with the last remaining witnesses who remembered the visit of the North Korean orphans and created a narrative about the power of compassion and the ruthlessness of large-scale history. Chu Sang-mi’s stirring documentary was released in 2018, winning Korea’s Kim Dae-jung Nobel Peace Film Award for filmmakers who work to promote peace.

Translated from Polish by Scotia Gilroy

Language English

children gone to poland