An Assailant's Face

1

From late June to September 1950, the eighth-grade boy attended K Junior High and lived with his married sister in Hyehwa-dong. On three separate occasions during those months, people came to their house looking for his brother-in-law. Even if his brother-in-law had wanted to escape danger, he couldn’t have avoided being captured and dragged away by these people—except for the last visitor, whose purpose and circumstances differed from the others’. For a time, all had been part of P Federation, so they all knew each other’s motives and circumstances. The first and second groups came to arrest their former comrade in order to have him serve their factions. Perhaps it was best that the boy’s brother-in-law left with the first group, thus speeding up the process that was inevitably headed toward disaster. However, the boy and his sister had no idea that that would be the last time they saw him.

The boy’s brother-in-law had graduated from O professional college at the end of the Japanese colonial period and immediately afterwards had taken a teaching position at J Junior High. During that time, his ideological beliefs had inclined toward the left, and after Liberation on August 15, he had become a member of the left-leaning national teachers’ organization. There were times when he had been more enthusiastic about political organizing than teaching. But after the formation of the Republic of Korea government in 1948, the political climate was no longer favorable for leftist activities. Furthermore, the brother-in-law’s youthful enthusiasm for socialism had cooled. To mark the end of that part of his life, he had publicly signed an oath, pledging that “he repented his past mistakes and would work for the newly established democratic government with all his might.” He had done this in a desperate attempt to protect himself, and had joined the right-wing organization called P Federation for the same reason. Afterwards, he had joined a campaign encouraging people with similar pasts to join the P Federation. Then he had returned to his old teaching job. For about two years he kept a low profile, and nothing major happened. Finally, the incident occurred that June.

The boy’s brother-in-law was in a state of confusion and could make neither heads nor tails of what was happening around him. The morning of June 26, when the people from P Federation came to the brother-in-law, the boy and his sister thought it was to protect him and help him escape from the predicament he was in. Early that morning, rumors had begun to spread that recent developments at the battlefront were unfavorable for the South Korean government.

“Comrade Kim,” the people from P Federation asserted, “how can we just sit here and watch when the country is in danger? We’ve decided to fight for the government even if it’s from behind the front lines. So, let’s go to our meeting place now. Don’t we all have a history of recanting? You know very well that our recantations are unforgivably treasonous in the eyes of the leftists. If the battle takes a wrong turn, this is the only way to survive. We mustn’t miss this opportunity to show our allegiance!”

Their concern seemed genuine, expressed out of loyalty to a comrade, so the brother-in-law had no reason to doubt what they said. That’s probably why he readily left with them. When the next group of people from P Federation arrived, intending to cover up their own recantations by accusing the boy’s brother-in-law of being a traitor, the boy’s sister was glad that her husband had already gone south.

This second group appeared near dusk on June 27, before the North Korean army crossed Miari Pass. They were fundamentally different from the first group. There were still many people in Seoul who had received the federation’s protection in return for recanting their leftist positions, even though these pledges...