hankyoreh

Koh Gi-jeong recalls his experiences during the Apr. 3 Jeju Massacre. (all photos by Huh Ho-joon)

The boy grabbed the branch of the silverberry tree and yanked hard, pulling away a handful of its ripe red fruit. Popping the fruit into his mouth, he ran back into the woods.

In January and February of 1949, there had been heavy snowfall on Mount Halla, and every silverberry tree was heavy with the globular red fruit called “bolle” in the Jeju accent. For the hungry people trying to survive on the snow-covered slopes of Mount Halla that winter, bolle were a godsend. Never again would the boy see the silverberry trees produce as much bolle as they did that season.

On the morning of Nov. 7, 1948, three soldiers in ponchos burst into the home of 11-year-old Koh Gi-jeong, who is now 81. Koh lived in Uigwi Village, in Namwon Township of South Jeju County (called Seogwipo today), in the uplands on Mount Halla. The wind was blowing, and it was a chilly day. The west wind carried black smoke into Koh’s house. Koh’s shivering family had moved from the main room to the annex room where their grandparents lived. The family consisted of Koh’s grandfather (Koh Gwang-ho, then 77), grandmother (Kim Gwang-il, 78), father (Koh Yeong-pyeong, 47), mother (Kim Yeon-ha, 43), the second of Koh’s oldest sisters (18) and two younger sisters.

“Guilty people go into hiding, so why should we do that?” Koh’s grandfather said, his mind set against leaving their home. Once again, Koh’s father tried to make him change his mind. “Even so, we need to get out of here. Look at the smoke rising; listen to the gunfire. What other choice do we have?” But his words fell on deaf ears.

Soldiers from the 9th Regiment came on a GMC military truck and went around the village, setting fire to the houses. The village was full of the stench of burning straw on the roofs. During a joint operation launched that day by the army and police, Sumang and Uigwi villages were put to the torch in the morning and Hannam Village in the afternoon. This was before the scorched earth operation had even taken off. The police were in charge of burning villages along the main road, while the military were assigned the villages in the uplands.

As the soldiers ran into the yard, they screamed, “Get out here, you commie bastards!” When Koh’s father stepped outside, a bullet fired. The soldiers didn’t even tell him why. Koh’s grandfather and grandmother were next. They all died there in the yard. The soldiers who had shot them set fire to the three straw-thatched houses where the Koh family had lived. The wind carried the flames to the piles of rice that the family had stacked in the yard for threshing. The bodies of Koh’s grandparents caught on fire, too. Koh and his family watched all this happen from the kitchen. Among more than 300 houses at Uigwi Village, all but 20 burned down that day.

After the gunfire abated and the soldiers left, Koh’s uncle and the villagers gathered together. That evening, they helped the family temporarily bury the three bodies in a field next to the house and move to their aunt’s house, which was next door. After spending ten or so days there, the Koh family followed the Uigwi, Sumang and Hannam villagers when they left to seek refuge at a place called Jojinnae, about 10km further up Mount Halla, to the west of a parasitic cone called Maheuni. The villagers believed that the thick forests on Mount Halla would keep them safe.

“The village elders said that things would quiet down if we stayed there for a week or so and said we would only need to stay away that long. We decided to go after having to hide every time we heard a gunshot while bringing in our crops. We ground a week’s supply of millet at the mill and loaded it on the ox we used to till the fields,” Koh said. Koh’s older sister followed them to their place of refuge, even though she was supposed to get married the next month.

Around 60 or 70 families gathered at the refuge. Each family stacked up low stone walls, covered them with sheaves of silver grass and spent their days in those shelters. But what was supposed to be a week of hiding dragged on with no end in sight.

On Dec. 20, the refuge was discovered by government troops. Since the refuge had swelled to the size of a small village by then, the villagers who ran low on food had to go outside to dig up sweet potatoes or find something else to eat, and they left tracks behind them in the snow. At the sound of gunfire, the villagers scattered. Those who had difficulty moving -- the elderly, the sick and mothers with newborn babies – had no way to escape the soldiers. It’s estimated that more than twenty villagers died there in the refuge. The soldiers broke the rice pots and plates and set fire to the sheaves of silver grass that covered the stores of food and stone walls.

Early that morning, Koh’s mother had set out to visit her own mother, who was in hiding nearby, only to be apprehended by the police and soldiers on the way. After Jojinnae was burned down, Koh’s family stayed with his maternal grandmother.

“After my mother was taken to the Pyoseon police station, she was let outside to relieve herself. She took that as an opportunity to scale the police station wall along with another wall they’d built beyond that. In the middle of the night, she followed the tracks in the snow all the way to where my grandmother was staying,” Koh said. Most of the 30 or so people who were taken to the police station with Koh’s mother were shot by a firing squad at Pyoseon beach.

Koh’s family and his uncle’s family remained in hiding in the woods and caves near the refuge. They weren’t able to stay in any one place for long and had to keep moving around to avoid the soldiers. For a while, they survived by boiling rotten sweet potatoes they brought back from Sumang and Uigwi villages, but when they ran out of the sweet potatoes, they went hungry.

For the families, starving and exhausted from the cold, wild bolle fruit were their greatest source of nutrients. “We would eat the whole bolle, pit and all, and when we defecated, our feces would be red. If it weren’t for the bolle, a lot of people would probably have starved to death. Bolle were an important food for us back then,” Koh said.

Whenever the families heard gunfire, they would cross Hachimaki Road, a supply road at an elevation of 600m that had been used by Japanese troops during the colonial occupation, and hide out for a while near Seongpanak Peak on Mount Halla.

“Whenever we heard gunfire or any other movement in the woods, we had no choice but to flee in the opposite direction,” Koh said. That winter, Koh’s mother traveled around with her youngest daughter on her back as she looked for somewhere to hide. When the cold was severe, they would light a fire, despite the risk of being discovered.

Koh’s family fled as far as Gwepeni parasitic cone (an elevation of 792m), which was not far from Seongpanak. The troops set fires at random in an attempt to destroy all remaining hiding places. When the cold receded and the snow was melting, the family heard whistles blowing shrilly further up the mountain. Two companies from the 2nd Battalion (stationed at Gyorae Village, Jocheon Township) were moving down from Seongpanak, trying to flush out anyone hiding there.

With the woods burning and nowhere to hide, Koh’s uncle, female cousin (13), mother, older sister, and younger sisters were caught by the troops. They were taken to Gyorae Village and then detained at a spirits factory in Jeju City. Koh and a male cousin (17) eluded the soldiers by running in the opposite direction and continued living on the run with people they met in the woods. They had to wear shoes made of crudely woven straw. Some of the others caught frostbite, and puss oozed from their feet.

When the spring of 1949 came, airplanes dropped leaflets urging people to turn themselves in. The bolle were gone, leaving nothing to eat in the hills. Since the leaflets said that people surrendering should carry a white flag, Koh and his cousin attached scraps of white cloth to sticks before they descended from the hills. The two had been hiding out in the woods so long that the wide open fields burned by the soldiers looked like vistas from another world.

“On our way coming down from the hills, we spent the night in a cave and then passed Uigwi Elementary School before giving ourselves up at the Namwon police station. The soldiers had been billeted at the school for about a month and a half, and the sports field was littered with the white bones of oxen. The villagers needed those oxen to plow their fields, but the soldiers had butchered them all. When I went up into the hills to save myself, I was 11 years old, and when I came back down, I was 12 years old,” Koh said.

After turning himself in, Koh spent 14 days in a button factory in Seogwipo that had been converted into a concentration camp before going home. His cousin, who was a little older, had to stay a month more. Koh’s memories of the button factory are intense: “It wasn’t a place for humans to live. I guess there were hundreds of people detained there, and it seemed like people were dying every day. The interrogations were so severe that some people came back half dead and others couldn’t walk without other people’s help.”

The soldiers and police built a stone wall around Uigwi Village and forced the residents of Uigwi, Sumang and Hannam to live inside the wall. Koh’s mother, older sister and younger sisters returned home after more than two months at the spirits factory. While the family was living inside the wall, Koh’s mother passed away the next year, in Aug. 1950, and his baby sister died of malnutrition less than one year after that.

Koh’s uncle, who had been with them, was transferred to a prison in Daejeon, and nothing was heard from him after that. While Koh was living inside the wall after returning from the button factory, he was conscripted to build more walls around Sumang and Hannam villages, along with Sinheung, another village in the area

“It was just awful. My father, grandfather and grandmother died in front of my eyes without a chance to say a single word. Whenever people were killed in raids by the soldiers while we were hiding out in the woods, I couldn’t get any sleep. They treated us worse than animals. If I told young people these days about all this, they probably wouldn’t believe me. They wouldn’t believe that something like that could actually have happened in this world.”

By Huh Ho-joon, Jeju correspondent

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