SEOUL, South Korea — The agony suffered by Park Yong-sik, 79, can never be healed, but he hopes the world can learn something from what he has endured.
He was 4 when North Korean soldiers seized his father. The two would meet again only once — briefly — nearly six decades later.
Now that his parent has died, Mr. Park wants to perform ancestral rites at his father’s death site in North Korea. The Korean Peninsula’s choked geopolitics, and the impenetrable barrier of the Demilitarized Zone, make that impossible.
Instead, he says he hopes a new initiative can immortalize his story and those of thousands like him. That project aims to preserve divided families’ life experiences in the UNESCO Memory of the World International Register.
The clock is ticking. As those separated since the Korean War ended in 1953 pass away, their stories may disappear forever.
Remembering the unforgettable
Mr. Park gave his testimonial in a meeting room of Seoul’s National Assembly last week to lawmakers, U.N. officials, archivists and academics. Foreign experts joined via video link.
The host was the Committee for the Promotion of the UNESCO Memory of the World Inscription of the Records of Korean Separated Families, founded in March.
“North and South Korea have experienced more than 70 years of profound human suffering,” said committee co-chair Lee Jang-hee, a former official of the Korean Red Cross who dealt with divided families for three decades.
“We seek to … have the records of Korean separated families inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register so that they can be remembered and preserved as a shared heritage of humanity,” Mr. Lee said.
“Separated families vividly bear witness to the historical wounds caused by the division of the Korean Peninsula,” said Ryu Jae-bok, president of the Association of (South) Korean Separated Families. “At the same time, they preserve the story of human affection and family reunions that transcend borders and ideology … they are a precious documentary heritage.”
Speakers advised depoliticization, internationalization and a focus on the human.
Alexandru Tanase, former president of the Constitutional Court of Moldova, discussed another divided territory: Bessarabia. Variously ruled by Moldova, Romania and Russia, Bessarabia was captured by the Soviet Union at the end of World War II, leaving families divided.
“People grow older and eventually, reunions become impossible,” Mr. Tanase said. “We cannot stop time, but we can preserve memories — and that can become a part of human history.”
The committee aims to establish a “detailed road map” to collect and archive images, letters, documents and artifacts before submitting an application to UNESCO.
The register was launched in 1992 to protect, digitize and offer access to objects, documents and audio-visual data that have importance for humanity, “particularly in areas affected by conflict and/or natural disaster.”
Its contents include medieval England’s “Magna Carta,” which made clear that kings were subject to laws, and the Gutenberg Bible, Europe’s first mass-printed book.
Conflict-related artifacts include records from Cambodia’s Tuol Sleng torture/execution facility, a memoir by the Nazi SS officer who liquidated the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943 and the diary of Anne Frank, a Jewish girl murdered in the Holocaust.
South Korean Unification Minister Chung Dong-young said registration would prove to be “a valuable milestone in transforming the tears and decades of waiting endured by separated families into a heritage of peace for all humanity.”
It is unknown how many divided families remain in North Korea. In South Korea, Unification Ministry data showed that of 134,516 persons officially registered, 101,148 had died as of the end of 2025.
Divided families are victims of circumstances beyond their control.
Korea was colonized by Japan in 1910. Following Tokyo’s World War II surrender in 1945, Korea was divided by great-power fiat: Soviet troops occupied the peninsula’s north, U.S. troops its south.
Political differences hardened, and two states were established in 1948. Low-intensity hostilities commenced swiftly.
Full-scale war exploded in 1950, when North Korea invaded South Korea. First Washington, then Beijing, intervened.
Even amid war, refugees flowed — largely, though not entirely, southward. After the carnage ended with 1953’s armistice, the DMZ took sinister shape across the waist of the peninsula.
Today, there are neither diplomatic nor economic ties between Seoul and Pyongyang. The two Koreas cannot interact via travel, post or telecommunications.
One man’s story
The tragedy of Mr. Park, a counselor for senior citizens, commenced on the Naktong River, in Korea’s southeast.
It was September 1950. For weeks, battle had raged along the river. Suddenly, agitated North Korean troops burst into Mr. Park’s village.
“They took all the young men, including my father,” he recalled. “They needed them to guide them north.”
Mr. Park did not know it then, but U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur had unleashed an amphibious landing at Inchon, some 200 miles behind North Korean lines to the northwest.
The invaders in the southeast had to exfiltrate fast — hence their press-gang tactics.
Mr. Park was left with his mother and 2-year-old brother. In the wartime winter, the toddler died of exposure.
War ended. Years passed. Then decades. His mother never remarried.
“For 56 years, I hated my father,” Mr. Park said.
Then, in 2006, he met him in one of 21 cross-border family reunions held from 2000 onward.
“The moment I met my father, my hatred was destroyed,” he said. “He was so kind, so sweet: He was so worried about us that he brought us vegetables he had grown in the North.”
He learned that his father had remarried in North Korea and that he had a half-brother and two half-sisters.
It would be their only meeting. Both parents subsequently died.
Via a now-closed communications channel — postage, via Japan — his half-brother informed him of his father’s death.
“My brother did a burial ritual in North Korea and asked me to pray; I still memorialize that day every year,” Mr. Park said. “Before I die, I want to visit my father’s burial site, but [North Korea] won’t provide a visa. So, it’s only a wish.”
The last divided family reunion took place in 2018. Amid cross-border tensions in 2025, North Korea demolished the purpose-built meeting site, constructed with $37 million of South Korean cash.
Mr. Park has lost faith in ever-squabbling Pyongyang and Seoul. Instead, he lends his voice to efforts like the UNESCO project.
“If reunification is left to governments, it will never happen,” he said. “Civil society has to be the ones that communicate.”
Though he cannot visit his father’s grave, he makes frequent pilgrimages to South Korea’s rugged northeast. There, just south of the DMZ, a lookout post with binoculars offers views over spectacular mountain and coastal scenery into a forbidden land.
“I sometimes go to the observatory up in Goseong County,” he said. “From there, you can see right into the North.”
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