'Could You Take Us To South Korea?'.(two North Korean orphans rescued from China)(Brief Article)

Up near the Chinese border with North Korea, where thousands of refugees ford the Tumen River, I crossed my own line. That was where I first met Park Chun-shik and Park Son-hee, two North Korean orphans, while on assignment in China in 1998. The brother and sister looked defeated. Their mother had died when they were young. When their father, an Army officer, was dying of gangrene contracted from frostbite, he sent them to stay with an uncle. But the uncle had hardly enough food to feed his own family, and ultimately, he put them on a train to the Chinese border, telling them that they had a better chance of surviving there.

An elderly ethnic Korean couple protected them for months. But the stress proved too much to bear, and one day they sent the kids off to a nearby market. A member of a Japan-based human-rights group, who had been supporting them, set them up in a tiny apartment, where I visited them again in 1999.

On that trip I carried with me two sturdy backpacks. I had decided that I would have to help them, somehow, to escape; they would ...