Refugee's Drawings

Courtesy of Weekly Chosun Magazine

Drawings by NK refugee Jang Gilsu

A man cuts up a human body and puts it into a boiling pot in order to eat it.

Sunil Jung was once arrested by the border patrol and imprisoned at a camp for political offenders for the crime of disclosing the real state of affairs in NK. The child Gilsu, in the background, is drawing pictures behind his mother.

The bulletin board states that a father will be executed in public because he had entered a neighbor's house to steal rice for his family.

A guard announces the list of crimes of the condemned man in front of a crowd.

Guards bind him around his mouth, abdomen, and knees with a rope.

The guards execute him by shooting.

Braving the rifle to get food.

We all became grasseaters. When will the day come that we can feast on steamed rice?

Tied onto a running train for attempting to cross the Tumen River into China. I shall not perish like this. I shall overcome and make it to the land of freedom alive.

To survive means to eat anything that comes along.

(1) Children of North Korea swimming to China in search of a way to survive. (2) Today, let's stuff ourselves up while we can. (3) Food-rationing card. We haven't had much chance to use it these few years. Over the past four years, all we had received was barely enough to last a month or two. We had thirty households in our village, but by last year (1998), ten of them had perished from hunger and disease.

Drawings by NK refugee Jang Gilsu
A man cuts up a human body and puts it into a boiling pot in order to eat it.
Sunil Jung was once arrested by the border patrol and imprisoned at a camp for political offenders for the crime of disclosing the real state of affairs in NK. The child Gilsu, in the background, is drawing pictures behind his mother.
The bulletin board states that a father will be executed in public because he had entered a neighbor's house to steal rice for his family.
A guard announces the list of crimes of the condemned man in front of a crowd.
Guards bind him around his mouth, abdomen, and knees with a rope.
The guards execute him by shooting.
Braving the rifle to get food.
We all became grasseaters. When will the day come that we can feast on steamed rice?
Tied onto a running train for attempting to cross the Tumen River into China. I shall not perish like this. I shall overcome and make it to the land of freedom alive.
To survive means to eat anything that comes along.
(1) Children of North Korea swimming to China in search of a way to survive. (2) Today, let's stuff ourselves up while we can. (3) Food-rationing card. We haven't had much chance to use it these few years. Over the past four years, all we had received was barely enough to last a month or two. We had thirty households in our village, but by last year (1998), ten of them had perished from hunger and disease.