Growing up in North Korea
World Watch Monitor, March 20, 2018
Until he was 9, John was cared for by his parents, but they then abandoned him. Sleeping rough, he survived the 4-year famine that started in 1994.
He finally left all that he had known and journeyed to the UK, where he attended university.
Told from childhood that Christianity was evil, he now wears a cross and talks about his past with a gentle smile.
“History in primary school was about the Kim family – a propaganda of loyalty. When Kim Il-sung died, I cried.
We had an anti-Christian education throughout. Foreign missionaries were wolves, Christianity an American religion and becoming a Christian a crime. If anyone became a Christian, they would disappear overnight.
As a child, I had to watch a public execution of a man who smuggled what we thought was a Bible from China.
When I reached China myself, I was shocked to find that wise words attributed to Kim Il-sung were from the Bible and that North Korea had started the Korean War in 1950.”