Despair

Some people deny the horrors of genocide, hoping to protect the reputation of their country or community. Some listen but quickly set the past aside and move on. Others are left devastated. 

We Do Not Part by Han Tang, recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, examines the response of two women years later to atrocities committed around the Korean War. The colleagues, one a writer and the other a photographer/videographer, both talented and compassionate, document the atrocities. A friendship forms and the unsettling subject matter inevitably intrudes and disrupts their own lives, eroding productivity and prompting nightmares. “Having decided to write about mass killings and torture, how could I have so naively – brazenly – hoped to soon shirk off the agony of it, to so easily be bereft of its traces?” explains Kyungha. 

The collaboration ends after Kyungha enters a doomed marriage and Inseon abruptly takes up carpentry and returns home to care for a mother losing her memories. Before the separation, Kyungha describes a recurring nightmare – blackened tree stumps shrouded in snow – and the two women plan to produce a short film based on the imagery, with the slim hope that such a project might vanquish the nightmares. 

Four years pass, leaving Kyungha certain the film will never be made, yet friendship, mutual respect and shared pain endure. “There are people who actively change the course of their own life,” Kyungha says of Inseon. “They make daring choices that others seldom dream of, then do their utmost to be accountable for their actions and the consequences of those actions. So in that time, no matter what life path they strike out on, people around them cease to be surprised.”

Inseon enters a hospital in Seoul after slicing her fingers while cutting wood and she calls Kyungha with a favor – travel to Jeju Island, about 150 kilometers from the southernmost tip of the Korean peninsula, during an intensifying snowstorm and rescue a lone white songbird left forgotten in its cage. 

Kyungha makes the trip and trapped by the weather and her own deep depression she wanders about her friend’s home, examining the meticulous research compiled by Inseon about the widespread massacres conducted on the island between1948 and 1949.  

June of this year marked the 75th anniversary of when North Korea crossed the 38th parallel and invaded South Korea, often referred to as the start of what many call the forgotten war. Fighting and divisions began earlier though, explains Grace Cho for the Nation, even as the US Army Military Government in Korea was the governing body of South Korea after World War II. 

Elections in 1948 formally separated the South and North, Cho explains, though the Soviet-controlled North rejected UN monitoring and many Koreans from both sides opposed permanent division. 

“Nowhere had the opposition to separate elections been as fierce as in the southern island province of Jeju, where most residents refused to vote in the election, and thereby threatened the legitimacy of the newly declared Republic of Korea,” Cho writes  With protests, strikes, and a growing insurgency, Jeju island was branded a “red island." In 1948, “an all-out offensive” against a band of an estimated a small group of guerilla fighters, estimated to number no more than 500, resulted in the deaths of more than 30,000 people, or 10 percent of the island's population.” 

A US naval blockade prevented those who tried to escape. Anti-communist fervor continued throughout the Korean War with critics jailed, newspapers closed, and the Bodo League killing up to 300,000 people regarded as communist or sympathizers and other political prisoners. 

Over the years, authorities targeted family members of Jeju Island victims who asked questions and tried to investigate. “Unlike other Korean War massacres that were partly motivated by uncertainty about whether enemy soldiers might be hiding among civilians, the Bodo League massacres cannot be called ‘collateral damage’ or chalked up to ‘the fog of war,’” Cho goes on to explain. “They were highly coordinated, carried out simultaneously across several provinces of South Korea, and the groundwork for them had been laid in April 1949. While the registry began as a list of people to be re-educated, it turned into a slate of people to be killed during a national emergency, a reminder that surveillance of political groups can quickly escalate into something much darker.“

The novel recalls the Jeju Island massacre’s influence on one family. Some villagers resisted and others collaborated; years later, some went silent and others questioned and protested.  

Years of shame, denial, persecution and official subterfuge eliminated much of the historical record. Inseon's older, quiet parents protect their young daughter from the worst details early on, but as a teenager, she resents the quiet secrets, harboring hatred especially for her mother. At 17, she runs away to Seoul and after an accident wakes to her mother’s presence. Only then her mother, among the few who pressed for answers, shares what she knows about the massacre and the relatives who vanished. 

Inseon adopts her mother's determination to uncover the lost history, at one point searching for the homesite where her father once lived before the village was ravaged by fire: “it was easy to tell from the lack of trees where the houses and paths had been.” But questions go unanswered. “Not when I’d never been told how big his childhood home had been nor on which side of the village it had stood.” 

An uncle was 19 when the massacre took place and his parents worried because “he was the only man at home within the age range the soldiers and police were likely to suspect of communicating with the guerrillas in the hills.” With rumors of torture and executions, the parents convinced their son to hide in nearby hills. “He heard whistles and saw the homes burning but instinct told him to stay hidden,”  later returning to find the village destroyed and most of his family dead.  

“[I]t’s no coincidence that some thirty thousand people were killed on this island that winter, and another two hundred thousand were murdered on the mainland the next summer,” the novel states. “The governing U.S. military ordered that everyone on the island, all roughly three hundred thousand people, be wiped out if that’s what it took to stop their communization.” Members of a youth league were trained, infused with resentment against communities holding different beliefs. “The murderous impulse to point a gun at an infant’s head was not only allowed but rewarded…” 

The poetic quality of  Han's prose is inescapable. At one point, alone in Inseon’s home, Kyungha places her hand over a photo of bones. “Over people who no longer had eyes or tongues. Over people whose organs and muscles had rotted away. Over what was no longer human – no. Over what remained human even now.”

Inseon’s findings are devastating for Kyungha, depressed before she began her journey, and the novel ends with her giving up on life, leaving shelter during the snowstorm and laying down to sleep. “Rapt in that strange, intense passion – and I couldn’t tell if it was excruciating pain or ecstasy – I walked through the biting wind, through the countless gathered who wore bodies spun from the wind. In that profound, uncanny euphoria, feeling my heart might rip open, I knew.”

The characters understand too well that leaders can instigate followers to turn on others easily, willingly. There is no guarantee that the resentment and hatred fueling genocide can’t happen again. 

The South Korean government issued an apology in 2003, and the police and defense ministry followed suit in 2019.  In April of this year, the executive board of UNESCO recognized the Jeju Massacre documents, as well as the truth-telling campaign that followed as “world heritage that belongs to all.”

Han's title refers to more than a friendship, but also to atrocities than can haunt with increasing intensity over the years, challenging societies or individuals who struggle to suppress the truth. 

Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Pryer wrote a 2014 essay about "Moral Injury: What Leaders Don't Mention When They Talk of War."  Pryer quotes Jonathan Shay from his 1994 book Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character: "Veterans can usually recover from horror, fear, and grief once they return to civilian life, so long as ‘what’s right’ has not also been violated."

The essay concludes: "Human beings are creatures of passion, and war displays this passion at its noblest and cruelest extremes. It stands to reason that our nation will not always choose only just wars to wage and that servicemembers will not always perform just combat actions. Nevertheless, human beings are also governed by moral forces. The great cost of underestimating these forces in the information age is surely too great to go long unnoticed and inadequately addressed. Our nation will not always be able to wage just wars justly, but we must try much harder to do so."

"What you could be..."

 

 

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr follows two children, one in Germany and the other in France, mostly between 1934 and 1944. Marie-Laure LeBlanc is blind and depends on her father who works for the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, for constant directions in moving about their home in Paris. Werner Pfennig, an orphan in the coal region of Essen, relies on books found in the trash to study mathematics and physics.

The two characters spend only one terrifying afternoon together, but there are earlier connections. Werner and his younger sister find a broken radio, which he repairs, so they can listen to broadcasts from around Europe, including a science program for children hosted by Marie-Laure’s grandfather. Ambitious, longing to do anything but work in the mines that killed his father, Werner tries to overlook the horrors of a fascist system, fearful when his sister speaks out. After the Nazis ban devices that access foreign programming, he smashes their radio, incurring his sister’s wrath.

Passing competitive exams, Werner is sent to a national political institute run by Nazis, a place where “every ounce of their attention has been trained to ferret out weakness.” Werner is protected by helping a professor research use of radio waves to locate transmitters. He befriends a wealthy, connected boy who loves nature and birds and refuses to humiliate others. Frederick recognizes that a cruel system traps them all and at one point advises, “Your problem, Werner, is that you still believe you own your life.” Werner “has the sensation that something huge and empty is about to devour them all.”

Werner is curious, keeping a notebook and logging all the questions he wishes to explore. Yet the fascist system, like extremist religions, is intent on control and preventing people from thinking for themselves. One instructor suggests: “Minds are always drifting toward ambiguity, toward questions, when what you really need is certainty. Purpose. Clarity. Do not trust your minds.” Later, on the front, another colleague marvels about Werner, “What you could be.” Werner finds himself missing the coal town he was so eager to leave and his sister: “her loyalty, her obstinacy, the way she always seems to recognize what is right.” She could see through  the Nazis’ angry propaganda: “How did Jutta understand so much more about how the world worked? While he knew so little?”

Marie-Laure, unable to see, is understandably fretful and anxious, full of questions about the impending invasion of France, and the writer is skilled in describing her surroundings through only the senses of taste, smell, sound and touch. Her father makes a model of their neighborhood and drills her on using her cane, counting drains and curbs, touching fences and tree trunks, to find her way home from unnamed locations. She possesses a few Braille workbooks along with a copy of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne. She comes to view the world as complex mazes: “The branches of trees, the filigree of roots, the matrix of crystals, the streets her father re-created in his models…. None were more complicated than the human brain… one wet kilogram within which spin universes.”

The father and daughter flee Paris for the coast and his uncle’s home, and the museum entrusts the man with a rare diamond, rumored to be cursed. Her father rejects such stories. “There is luck maybe, bad or good. A slight inclination of each day toward success or failure. But no curses.”

Marie-Laure and their housekeeper convince her introvert uncle to support the resistance. Werner’s unit detects the family’s hidden radio, and the two children connect in person and help one another. One survives and the other perishes. 

The war teaches that ordinary life – simple, normal secure routines rather than power or riches – is heaven. Those on either side who survive the war are traumatized. Every bite of food, any comfort, feeling like a betrayal to those who did not. Brutal memories sabotage pleasant ones, and grief about those who did not survive prick any scrap of happiness. Decades later, the character who survives wonders if the war’s dead and missing might travel the sky in flocks – “That great shuttles of souls might fly about… They flow above the chimneys, ride the sidewalks, slip through your jacket and shirt and breastbone and lungs and pass out through the other side, the air a library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken, every word transmitted still reverberating within it. Every hour… someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world. We will rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.”

Ordinary beauty can be the most rewarding, and some we do not notice until it vanishes. 

Point of view

Helmet cameras offer a closeup look at fighting. Like any tool, like the internet itself, they can aid in analysis and understanding or they can be cheap thrill, watched with little thought at all, explains Greg Jaffee of the Washington Post.