Abductee: Kim Geun-ho
Recorded Date: January 21, 2006


Profile of Abductee

Name: Kim Geun-ho
Date of Birth: March 8, 1907
Place of Birth: Ganghwa, South Korea
Last Address: 123 Gahwe-dong, Jongno-gu, Seoul, South Korea
Date of Abduction: July 26, 1950 (age 43)
Place of Abduction: At his home
Occupation: President of Baejae School, Dongyang Shipment.Ltd
Education/Career: Baejae High School
Dependants: Wife, 3 boys, 4 girls
Appearance/ Personality: a robust body with outgoing characteristic


Profile of Testifiers

Name: 1. Whang Sun-young (born in 1910) 2. Kim Young-il (born in 1935)
Relationship: 1. Wife 2. Eldest Son
Type of Witness: 1st handed


Summary of the Abduction

- The abductee was engaged in shipment business, serving as chief director at Bae Jae school. With the rise of local leftists, he hid himself at the house of his friend, but he came back home out of concern of his family.
- In about July, he had his house attached and on July 27, a man came and took him to the Internal Police station for questioning.


Description of abduction

HSY: I’m sure about the date. Now I’m close to 100 years old and I tend to forget many things. When he was staying at home, they just took him away, saying that they were not making arrest of him but just needed to question him and not to worry. So I waited that day, and the next day, I went there with youngest kid on my back. My eldest son also went there. But they replied he was not there. We made many visits to the place to no avail. And at some point, I had to give up searching him.

KYI: Before the abduction of my father, people not looking like solders came into the village, and soldiers, then security corps came in. The group of people who first came in were like policemen, but in uniforms different from the real policemen. The second group, solders were wearing yellowish or green colored uniforms. They all were wearing same shoulder straps but different colored uniforms. It seemed that they gave a specific instruction that people in the South should be purified. The people who worked for them were people living in the village. They had shoulder ensign painted in red and walked around the village. As the situation was turning bad, he escaped for a while to the home of his colleague at work in Samcheong-dong. I made a frequent visit from there to home. My father that time was run down and had to come back home.

My father was a family man, loving his wife and his children so dearly. I guess that is one of the reasons that made him return to home. Anyway, they started to have our house attached, sticking something on everything and preventing us from using them. As days passed by, more the atmosphere of fear developed.

It was on July 27, I think, when a man knocked the door, asked for a few moments and took my father away. I guess he was taken near the police box. There were many people brought and some of them were sent after questioning.

A man among those who were released brought my father’s watch to us, saying that my father asked to give the watch to us for our living. My father has not been heard of since. All I heard was that the people abducted at that time were taken to the North. This is somewhat proved by some people who managed to escape in downtown Seoul or near Uijeongbu.

Q. Why didn’t your family take refuge immediately after the Korean War outbreak?
KYI: At that time, the situation in Seoul appeared fine. At the night before June 25, there was sound of cannon fires, and the next morning, military men in the trucks were passing toward the north. Two days later, we were heard that the North Korean soldiers were coming in, and soldiers paraded and we gathered to watch them. At that time, there weren’t big combat going on in the area near my home, but I was later told that in the places near Young-san, soldiers who were retreating failed to run away with the bridge nearby destroyed, and they got into a fierce battle, shooting each other.
At that time, remnants of the defeated troops came in secret to civilians’ home for some clothes and ran away. Many nameless, yet brave Korean soldiers died near Yong-san.

Q. So when did your family move for refuge?
KYI: After my father was abducted in July, we left our home. We took a ferryboat in Han River to a cottage in Ganghwa. On the way there, the U.S. airplane, B29, were patrolling and stop us to check if we were civilians or not. I don’t have bad impressions about Americans during the Korean War. Back then, there were many argent anti-communists.
Even some civilians throw a fire to the North Korean armory. Then fighting planes came and shoot. For some reason, a day before a great bombing, planes flew over, scattering fliers, announcing, “Bombings to be carried out tomorrow! Civilians must flee out of this area -General, Mac Author.” When we review the past, some say that the U.S. soldiers slaughtered innocent people. That surely happened. However, if we make issues every single incident, we’ll end up picturing the whole different scene different from what really happened.

That is a big problem. Once in a while, I see a Korean movie, and one movie described the incident where a man who ate some flour that was given from communists was accused of betraying his country to the enemy, and was killed. I’m saying that kind of incidents indeed happened. I’m one of the witnesses. But, if only one side of stories is told, it would be understood that all innocent people was massacred in the South.

When we were in a country side, North Koreans killed all the country people with spears while running away. Then all the dead bodies went rotten. The families of the dead ones were looking all over to find

Q. When did you come back to Seoul?
KYI: When we arrived in Incheon, my family walked to Seoul to meet father. Of course, it was our wish. The North Koreans had already taken abductees to North Korea, and they made our house their office. As all the tall buildings were targets for bombing, they used large houses as their office. The North Koreans used the Myeongdong Catholic Church as their armory because they believed that the American troops would never bomb the church.

Q. Was there efforts to find the abductee?
HSY: I went to places where abductees gathered, but I couldn’t find him.


Reason behind the Abduction

Q. How did you know that the abductee was taken to North Korea?
HSY: How could we stay calm when everyone was talking about it? When going over to the
abductees’ houses, their family were making scene, crying out. We did all we could do to find the
missing ones, but failed. Many were abducted in Gahwe-dong too.

Q. Why do you think he was abducted?
KYI: “I think the abduction was one of the communistic ways to purify their society. Getting rid of people with ideology different from theirs is a basic step in managing their system. The purge staged in the Soviet Union, the Cultural Revolution in China, and the massacres in Cambodia, they all have this process in common. In Russia, when one family’s head was being caught and taken by the Soviet Union secret police, he told to his family, “Don’t worry, I will be back soon”, and never returned. This is so similar to our case. Abduction of this kind had happened and the North copied it.
The North’s tight control over their people and the South Korean government’s passive attitude to this matter have concealed what has been really going on in the North. I believe now in the North, unspeakably tragic situation are going on. We’ll never know what has happened in the North, though five million North Koreans have died away, and even if we’d achieve unification someday.


News after the Abduction

Q. Was there any news since he was abudcted?
No.