Over 1500 WATCH LIVE as North Korean Pastor is Publicly Executed for Sharing the Message of Jesus
My name is Jin Ho. I’m a North Korean defector. I’m a Christian. I’m the brother of a martyr.
I live in a country now where I can say these things out loud. Where I can own a Bible and leave it on my table without fear.
Where I can go to church on Sunday and sing hymns with my eyes open.
With my voice loud, with my hands raised. But I cannot go home. I will never go home.
Home is a place where my brother’s blood soaks into the ground on a June morning in 2009.
Home is a place where his children, my niece and nephews, grew up behind barbed wire in a prison camp, if they are still alive.
Home is a place I carry in my chest like a stone, heavy and cold every single day.
I am here today to tell you what happened to my brother. To tell you what happened to our family, to tell you what is still happening right now at this very moment, to Christians in North Korea.
This is not an easy story to tell. There are nights when I wake up and I can still hear the sound of the gunshots.
There are days when I see my brother’s face in crowds and I have to remember all over again that he is gone.
But I must tell it. I promised him I would tell it even though he never knew I made that promise.
Even though by the time I made it, he was already dead. So let me take you back back to before the darkness came.
Back to when we were just two brothers growing up in a small town near the Chinese border trying to survive in a country that was slowly starving to death.
Ryong Chan is not a place you would have heard of before 2004 when a train explosion killed hundreds of people there.
Even after that, the world forgot about it quickly. It is a small town in North Pyongan province close to the border with China.
Close enough that on clear days if you climbed the hills outside town you could see across the Yaloo River into another country into a different world.
We grew up there, my brother Sunung Min and I. He was four years older than me.
Our father died when I was 9 years old during the worst years of the famine in the 1990s.
We called those years the arduous march, though that name makes it sound noble, like something to be proud of.
There was nothing noble about watching your father waste away because there was no food.
Nothing noble about eating bak soup and wondering if you would wake up the next morning.
My brother was 13 when our father died. I watched him change almost overnight. He became serious, protective.
He took on work that a boy should not have to do. Carrying loads at the train station, helping farmers in the fields, anything to bring home a bit of food or money.
Our mother worked at a textile factory when there was work to be had. But often the factory closed for weeks at a time because there was no electricity or no materials.
So Sunung Min became the pillar of our family. I remember his hands. Even as a young man, his hands were rough and scarred from work, but they were gentle, too.
When I was sick, he would lay his hand on my forehead to check for fever.
When I was afraid, and we were afraid often in those days, he would put his hand on my shoulder and I would feel safer.
He was not perfect. He had a temper sometimes, especially with a neighborhood bully who used to steal from smaller children.
He got into trouble once for talking back to a teacher who had accused him of something he did not do.
But he was good. Though even in a place where goodness could get you killed, where kindness was seen as weakness, sung was good.
We grew up like all North Korean children grow up. We worshiped Kim Ilang and Kim Jong-il because we had two.
We learned that they were gods, that they created the sun and the moon, that they loved us more than our own parents loved us.
We attended the self-criticism sessions where we had to confess our failings and denounce anyone who had failed.
We marched in the parades. We sang the songs. We wore the pins with their faces on our chests over our hearts.
But even as a child, I remember wondering. I remember looking at the pin on my chest and thinking, “If they love us so much, why are we hungry?
If they are gods, why did my father die? I never said these thoughts out loud.
You learn very young in North Korea that some thoughts must stay inside your head, locked away where no one can hear them.
Swang men wonder too. I could see it in his face sometimes when we stood in the cold for hours at the rally.
Our stomachs empty, our feet numb, praising the dear leader. He would get this look in his eyes, distant and questioning.
But he never spoke about it either. Not then. The years passed. The famine eased a little, though there was never enough.
We survived. That was what life was. Surviving. We were not living. We were just trying to make it through one more day, one more week, one more winter.
In 2005, when Sunung Min was 22 years old, he started making trips across the border into China.
Many people in Ryong Chan did this. The border was heavily guarded. But there were ways across if you knew the right people and had a little money to bribe the guards.
People went to trade, to find food, to find work. It was illegal. But the authorities looked the other way sometimes because they knew people were desperate.
Sung Min told our mother he was going to buy goods to sell in the market.
Medicine, soap, things we could not get in North Korea. He would be gone for two or three days, sometimes a week.
Our mother worried every time he left. If he was caught, he could be sent to a labor camp.
But we needed the money. We needed what he could bring back. So she let him go.
I noticed something different about him when he came back from his third or fourth trip.
It was late 2006, November or December. The winter was already bitter cold. He came home late at night and I woke up when I heard him come in.
We shared a small room sleeping on mats on the floor. I heard him moving around in the darkness and I whispered his name.
He came and sat next to me. I could barely see his face in the dark, but I could feel something had changed.
There was a stillness in him, a quietness that was different from his usual silence.
He did not say much that night. He just asked me if I ever wondered if there was something more than this, more than the life we were living, more than just surviving until we died.
I did not know what to say. I was only 18 years old and I had never heard anyone talk like that before.
Over the next few months, Sunungin made more trips. Each time he came back, I saw the change growing in him.
He became thoughtful. He stopped complaining about things that used to bother him. He started treating our mother with even more tenderness than before.
He would sit for long hours at night just thinking, staring at nothing. I asked him once what was happening to him, what he had found in China that was changing him.
He looked at me for a long moment and I saw something in his eyes I had never seen before.
It was fear, yes, but it was also joy. A kind of joy I did not understand.
Then one night in early 2007, he told me. We waited until our mother was asleep.
We went outside and walked to the edge of town where there was an old storage building that had been abandoned.
No one went there at night. It was safe or as safe as anywhere could be.
Inside that building in the darkness, my brother told me he had found God. I did not understand what he meant at first.
We had been taught there was no God. That religion was the opiate of the masses, a tool used by Americans and South Koreans to poison people’s minds.
I had never met anyone who believed in God. I had never even thought about whether God might exist.
Sun told me that on his second trip to China, he had met a Korean Chinese man who helped people cross the border.
This man had given him food and a place to sleep. And in this man’s house, Sunung Min had seen a book, a Bible.
He asked the man about it. The man was afraid at first. He knew North Koreans were taught to report anything like this.
But something made him trust sung. He began to tell him about Jesus Christ, about a God who loved people so much that he sent his son to die for them, about forgiveness, about eternal life, about hope.
Sun said he argued with the man at first. It sounded like foolishness. It sounded like propaganda, just a different kind than what we had been fed our whole lives.
But the man gave him the Bible and told him to read it. Just read it and see for himself.
So, Sung Min read. He hid the Bible in his bag and read it on the journey home.
He read it by candle light in our room while I was asleep. He read it and something broke open inside him.
When he told me all this, I was terrified. I knew what happened to people who were caught with Bibles.
I had heard stories of public executions, of entire families sent to prison camps. I begged him to throw the Bible away, to forget everything he had read, to save himself, to save our family.
But he could not. He told me he had tried. He had tried to forget to go back to how things were before.
But he could not unknow what he now knew. He could not unfill what he had felt when he read about Jesus calling people to come to him all who were weary and burdened and he would give them rest.
He said those words to me there in the darkness. He had memorized them. All who are weary and burdened and we were so weary.
We carried burdens so heavy. Come to me and I will give you rest. I started to cry.