The Marmot’s Hole

The “Last of the Female Partisans,” Mrs. Jeong Sun-deok, passed away today due to heart failure. She was 70. At the age of 18, Jeong went up into the Jiri Mountains in February 1951 to find her husband, who had followed the North Korean People’s Army into the hills. She spent the next 13 years as a communist guerrilla, and was finally arrested in November 1963, the “last of the partisans.” Despite loosing a leg after she was shot during her arrest, she did 23 years in prison; she was paroled in 1985, and led a meager existence afterward. In recent years, she had been requesting that she be sent North, but was being refused because she signed an “ideological conversion statement” in a Daegu prison in 1965.

For more on Northern repatriation, see this post on the Oranckay’s blog.

UPDATE: There’s an English piece on this in the Korea Times, but I find it a little odd:

A native of North Korea, Chong came to South Korea during the Korean War. After the war, aged 18, she joined her husband, who was waging a guerilla campaign in Mount Jiri in southern South Korea. She was captured in 1963.

Believed to be the last surviving North Korean guerilla in South Korea, Chong was released from prison in 1985. She signed a document in 1965, while in prison, saying that she would renounce communism, but she wanted to return to the North.

Unless you regard Sancheong County, South Gyeongsang Province (near Pusan) as North Korean territory, Jeong was most certainly not North Korean. Nor was her husband, who joined the North Korean army when it occupied the area, and fled into the mountains when the R.O.K. army took it back. To put this another way, she wasn’t North Korean, and she didn’t want to return to North Korea — she was just a straight-up South Korean communist, and I don’t know why the KT didn’t report that as such.

UPDATE II: The Korea Herald is making the same error, perhaps because they took the piece straight from the Times.