Zur Konferenz (Englisch)

North Korea sent 20,000 war orphans to China, 1500 to Romania, 500 to Bulgaria, and 600 to East Germany in the 1950s, starting in 1952, while the Korean War was still ongoing. In 1952 alone, 200 war orphans from North Korea were hosted by Hungary, 200 by Poland, 200 by the Czech Republic, and 200 from Mongolia. The Eastern Bloc hosted a total of more than 4,000 war orphans. It is not yet known how many war orphans the Soviet Union received. It is not yet clear how many went to individual Eastern European countries, but a conservative estimate of the number of North Korean war orphans who went abroad in the 1950s is around 24,000 or more. Not all of them were war orphans, but many of them were real orphans, ranging in age from 12 to 16 years old. The governments of the Eastern Bloc countries decided to invite North Korean war orphans to evacuate the war, and the North Korean government took advantage of this atmosphere to send as many children as possible abroad, not only to evacuate the war but also to receive basic education and vocational training in socialist countries.
They envisaged long-term stays in socialist countries, where they would receive basic and vocational education. North Korea had two overall premises. The first was that the host country would bear all the costs of the orphans' travel, stay, and education, and the second was that all the young people would return to North Korea after completing their education and participate in post-war reconstruction as professionals. However, the project was more improvised and ad hoc than systematically planned and executed.
This conference seeks to answer the following questions. How did so many war orphans manage to go abroad? What were the living conditions and educational practices of the students, and what was the process of vocational training after leaving school? How did their academic performance compare to the local population? How did they adapt to the local culture and how did they relate to the locals? Furthermore, how did the overseas experience shape the character of these young people as they were growing up? How did they return to North Korea, and what role did they play in their return? The presenters present their research on North Korean war orphans in their respective countries based on primary archival sources.

Programm

November 8, 2024

November 9, 2024