Nkorean defector, honored by Trump, had remarkable escape
SEOUL, South Korea — When President Donald Trump wanted to highlight the brutality of North Korea’s government during his State of the Union address Tuesday, he pointed to a man in the audience who had traveled thousands of miles on crutches to find freedom.
The story that man, Ji Seong Ho, tells of his escape is remarkable even by the standards of North Korean defectors. When Trump pointed him out, Ji jubilantly raised his crutches as television cameras captured the moment.
In 1996, Ji was 13, his parents’ eldest son, living in a mining village near the city of Hoeryong in northern North Korea. The country was in the midst of a famine that would kill more than 2 million, by some estimates. Surviving on roots and corn stalks, members of Ji’s family became so weak that they spent most of the day lying on the floor, sometimes hallucinating, he said in a 2014 interview.
His grandmother had died of hunger the previous year. In school, teachers were too weak to teach. Few students showed up to class.
Ji said he began stealing coal from moving freight trains, to barter it for corn.
“There must have been 100 of us. When the train moved out of the station at night, we came out of hiding and crawled up the cars like zombies,” Ji said. “If we missed the train, our families would have nothing to eat for a few days.”
Villagers could steal the coal only between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m., when the train was not guarded by armed police officers, he said. They had no flashlights.
On the night of March 7, 1996, as Ji was hurling sacks of coal off a train for his sister to gather up, he fainted from hunger and exhaustion and tumbled between two cars. When he came to, he was beside the rails, the train pulling away. His left leg and arm had been cut off. His frantic sister was crying for help, even as other villagers scurried away with sacks of coal.
He was carried to a local clinic, where a doctor operated on him twice, without anesthesia or a blood transfusion, he said.