The story of Eun Hye is one that is typical of many who have come to believe while living in repressive and anti-Christian cultures. Eun Hye is not her real name, which has been kept secret by the Christian organizations that have helped her in order to protect her and her North Korean relatives. When Eun Hye’s parents travelled to China to try to find two of their daughters who were missing, Eun Hye ended up in a crowded official “camp” for street children where conditions were abysmal. Forced to learn to hunt rats (which were plentiful), the sixteen-year-old was barely able to survive and began to pray to “Hananim,” the invisible God who her grandmother had told her about.
As reported by Christian organizations that have worked with her, one day, the camp guards sought volunteers for work in the mountains and Eun Hye heard a voice in her head urging her to volunteer. She did, and while in the mountains she and another girl were left alone just long enough to escape. After an arduous journey – without supplies – hiking through mountains, swimming across a reservoir, and tunneling under an embankment with their bare hands, Eun Hye finally reached her hometown where she was reunited with her family. Her father had become a Christian and explained to her who the God Hananim was. Soon after, the family swam across a border river and escaped to China where they were able to join an underground church. But the group was betrayed and Eun Hye and her family were arrested and transported to a detention center in North Korea. There, Eun Hye suffered frostbite, her parents were brutally interrogated, and the father confessed to being a Christian. Yet miraculously, the family was released and returned to their home.
Eventually, as the family did not have enough food for everyone, Eun Hy and her mother swam across the river into China, somehow surviving as the North Korean guards fired at them. Eun Hye was able to settle in China,though she has been in continued danger of betrayal and miraculously escaped several attempts to capture her. At one point the truck sent to take her back to North Korea broke down and she was somehow released. Her father eventually died from his interrogation injuries, and her brother remains trapped in North Korea. However, Eun Hye married in China and was able to flee with her husband to South Korea, where she lives today.
Eun Hye is a fortunate Christian. She is one of the few who have escaped – and the very few who have escaped twice – from the horrific situation in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, where the only gods people are permitted to worship are the nation’s brutal rulers: Kim Jong-un and his family. Most believers suffer – and a great many die as a result of their faith.
For nearly two decades, the totalitarian communist state has been named the worst place in the world to be a Christian by Open Doors, the Christian charity which tracks persecution of the faith around the globe. The organization estimates that there are around 300,000 Christians (about one per cent of the country’s total population) living in constant fear in North Korea, and of those 300,000, Open Doors believes some 50,000-70,000 are imprisoned in brutal labor camps where inmates are treated horrendously, and most are eventually worked to death.
For those of us living in the nations of the Western world and in many other areas around the globe, it is hard to really comprehend the suffering that is ongoing for Christians in North Korea and other repressive nations – but we must not ignore it. As the book of Hebrews reminds us, we have a responsibility toward those who are suffering for their faith: “Continue to remember those in prison as if you were together with them in prison, and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering” (Hebrews 13:3). Remembering the persecuted in our prayers is something we can all do to help them. The other thing we can do is to support organizations like Open Doors and to pray for the work they are doing to help those who, despite all they are enduring in places like North Korea, are remaining faithful.
