My name is Jin Ho.

I’m a North Korean defector.

I’m a Christian.

I’m the brother of a martyr.

I live in a country now where I can say these things out loud.

Where I can own a Bible and leave it on my table without fear.

Where I can go to church on Sunday and sing hymns with my eyes open.

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With my voice loud, with my hands raised.

But I cannot go home.

I will never go home.

Home is a place where my brother’s blood soaks into the ground on a June morning in 2009.

Home is a place where his children, my niece and nephews, grew up behind barbed wire in a prison camp, if they are still alive.

Home is a place I carry in my chest like a stone, heavy and cold every single day.

I am here today to tell you what happened to my brother.

To tell you what happened to our family, to tell you what is still happening right now at this very moment, to Christians in North Korea.

This is not an easy story to tell.

There are nights when I wake up and I can still hear the sound of the gunshots.

There are days when I see my brother’s face in crowds and I have to remember all over again that he is gone.

But I must tell it.

I promised him I would tell it even though he never knew I made that promise.

Even though by the time I made it, he was already dead.

So let me take you back back to before the darkness came.

back to when we were just two brothers growing up in a small town near the Chinese border trying to survive in a country that was slowly starving to death.

Ryong Chan is not a place you would have heard of before 2004 when a train explosion killed hundreds of people there.

Even after that, the world forgot about it quickly.

It is a small town in North Pyongan province close to the border with China.

Close enough that on clear days if you climbed the hills outside town you could see across the Yaloo River into another country into a different world.

We grew up there, my brother Sunung Min and I.

He was four years older than me.

Our father died when I was 9 years old during the worst years of the famine in the 1990s.

We called those years the arduous march, though that name makes it sound noble, like something to be proud of.

There was nothing noble about watching your father waste away because there was no food.

Nothing noble about eating bak soup and wondering if you would wake up the next morning.

My brother was 13 when our father died.

I watched him change almost overnight.

He became serious, protective.

He took on work that a boy should not have to do.

Carrying loads at the train station, helping farmers in the fields, anything to bring home a bit of food or money.

Our mother worked at a textile factory when there was work to be had.

But often the factory closed for weeks at a time because there was no electricity or no materials.

So Sunung Min became the pillar of our family.

I remember his hands.

Even as a young man, his hands were rough and scarred from work, but they were gentle, too.

When I was sick, he would lay his hand on my forehead to check for fever.

When I was afraid, and we were afraid often in those days, he would put his hand on my shoulder and I would feel safer.

He was not perfect.

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He had a temper sometimes, especially with a neighborhood bully who used to steal from smaller children.

He got into trouble once for talking back to a teacher who had accused him of something he did not do.

But he was good.

Though even in a place where goodness could get you killed, where kindness was seen as weakness, sung was good.

We grew up like all North Korean children grow up.

We worshiped Kim Ilang and Kim Jong-il because we had two.

We learned that they were gods, that they created the sun and the moon, that they loved us more than our own parents loved us.

We attended the self-criticism sessions where we had to confess our failings and denounce anyone who had failed.

We marched in the parades.

We sang the songs.

We wore the pins with their faces on our chests over our hearts.

But even as a child, I remember wondering.

I remember looking at the pin on my chest and thinking, “If they love us so much, why are we hungry? If they are gods, why did my father die? I never said these thoughts out loud.

You learn very young in North Korea that some thoughts must stay inside your head, locked away where no one can hear them.

Swang men wonder too.

I could see it in his face sometimes when we stood in the cold for hours at the rally.

Our stomachs empty, our feet numb, praising the dear leader.

He would get this look in his eyes, distant and questioning.

But he never spoke about it either.

Not then.

The years passed.

The famine eased a little, though there was never enough.

We survived.

That was what life was.

Surviving.

We were not living.

We were just trying to make it through one more day, one more week, one more winter.

In 2005, when Sunung Min was 22 years old, he started making trips across the border into China.

Many people in Ryong Chan did this.

The border was heavily guarded.

But there were ways across if you knew the right people and had a little money to bribe the guards.

People went to trade, to find food, to find work.

It was illegal.

But the authorities looked the other way sometimes because they knew people were desperate.

Sung Min told our mother he was going to buy goods to sell in the market.

Medicine, soap, things we could not get in North Korea.

He would be gone for two or three days, sometimes a week.

Our mother worried every time he left.

If he was caught, he could be sent to a labor camp.

But we needed the money.

We needed what he could bring back.

So she let him go.

I noticed something different about him when he came back from his third or fourth trip.

It was late 2006, November or December.

The winter was already bitter cold.

He came home late at night and I woke up when I heard him come in.

We shared a small room sleeping on mats on the floor.

I heard him moving around in the darkness and I whispered his name.

He came and sat next to me.

I could barely see his face in the dark, but I could feel something had changed.

There was a stillness in him, a quietness that was different from his usual silence.

He did not say much that night.

He just asked me if I ever wondered if there was something more than this, more than the life we were living, more than just surviving until we died.

I did not know what to say.

I was only 18 years old and I had never heard anyone talk like that before.

Over the next few months, Sunungin made more trips.

Each time he came back, I saw the change growing in him.

He became thoughtful.

He stopped complaining about things that used to bother him.

He started treating our mother with even more tenderness than before.

He would sit for long hours at night just thinking, staring at nothing.

I asked him once what was happening to him, what he had found in China that was changing him.

He looked at me for a long moment and I saw something in his eyes I had never seen before.

It was fear, yes, but it was also joy.

A kind of joy I did not understand.

Then one night in early 2007, he told me.

We waited until our mother was asleep.

We went outside and walked to the edge of town where there was an old storage building that had been abandoned.

No one went there at night.

It was safe or as safe as anywhere could be.

Inside that building in the darkness, my brother told me he had found God.

I did not understand what he meant at first.

We had been taught there was no God.

That religion was the opiate of the masses, a tool used by Americans and South Koreans to poison people’s minds.

I had never met anyone who believed in God.

I had never even thought about whether God might exist.

Sun told me that on his second trip to China, he had met a Korean Chinese man who helped people cross the border.

This man had given him food and a place to sleep.

And in this man’s house, Sunung Min had seen a book, a Bible.

He asked the man about it.

The man was afraid at first.

He knew North Koreans were taught to report anything like this.

But something made him trust sung.

He began to tell him about Jesus Christ, about a God who loved people so much that he sent his son to die for them, about forgiveness, about eternal life, about hope.

Sun said he argued with the man at first.

It sounded like foolishness.

It sounded like propaganda, just a different kind than what we had been fed our whole lives.

But the man gave him the Bible and told him to read it.

Just read it and see for himself.

So, Sung Min read.

He hid the Bible in his bag and read it on the journey home.

He read it by candle light in our room while I was asleep.

He read it and something broke open inside him.

When he told me all this, I was terrified.

I knew what happened to people who were caught with Bibles.

I had heard stories of public executions, of entire families sent to prison camps.

I begged him to throw the Bible away, to forget everything he had read, to save himself, to save our family.

But he could not.

He told me he had tried.

He had tried to forget to go back to how things were before.

But he could not unknow what he now knew.

He could not unfill what he had felt when he read about Jesus calling people to come to him all who were weary and burdened and he would give them rest.

He said those words to me there in the darkness.

He had memorized them.

All who are weary and burdened and we were so weary.

We carried burdens so heavy.

Come to me and I will give you rest.

I started to cry.

I do not know why.

Maybe because I heard something in those words that my soul recognized even though my mind did not understand.

Maybe because I saw in my brother’s face a peace that I had never seen in anyone’s face in my entire life.

Maybe because I was afraid.

Maybe because I was hopeful.

Maybe both.

That night, Sunung Min showed me where he had hidden the Bible.

He had buried it in our small courtyard inside a clay jar wrapped in plastic to keep it dry.

He would dig it up late at night when everyone was asleep and read by the faintest candle light.

He asked me not to tell anyone, not even our mother.

Not yet.

It was too dangerous.

If I knew I was already in danger.

If I told anyone else, the danger would spread.

I promised him I would keep his secret.

But over the next months, the secret became mine, too.

Sun started reading to me from the Bible.

Late at night, in whispers so quiet I had to lean close to hear him.

He will tell me what he had learned about creation, about the fall, about the flood and the tower and the patriarchs, about Moses and the Exodus and the promised land, about King David and the prophets, and then about Jesus born in a manger, teaching in parables, healing the sick, raising the dead, dying on a cross, rising on the third day.

It sounded impossible one.

It sounded like a fairy tale.

But something in me wanted it to be true.

Something in me needed it to be true.

By late 2007, I had become a believer myself.

Though I am not sure I could have told you exactly what I believed.

I just knew that when Sunungin talked about Jesus, something in me said yes.

When he read the words of scripture, something in me recognized them as truth.

We were not alone for long.

Sang Minet a man at the market, someone who had also been to China.

They recognized something in each other, some sign that I still do not fully understand.

A way of speaking, a gentleness, a light in the eyes.

They talked carefully at first, testing each other, and then the man admitted he too had found Christ in China.

His name was Mr.

Choi.

He was older, maybe 40, with a wife and two daughters.

He had been reading the Bible for almost a year, alone, afraid, hungry for fellowship.

The three of them, Sang Min, Mr.

Choi, and Mr.

Choi’s wife, started meeting in secret.

once a week late at night in different places, an abandoned shed, a storage room at the back of the market, the hills outside town when the weather was warm enough.

I joined them on the fourth or fifth meeting.

There were five of us then.

We sat in a circle in the darkness and sang min read from the Bible by flashlight.

We did not know any hymns yet.

We did not know how to pray out loud.

We just listened to the words and let them sing into us like rain into dry ground.

More people came slowly, carefully.

A woman whose husband had died.

A young man who worked at the train station.

An elderly woman who reminded me of my grandmother.

When each person came carrying the same desperate hope that maybe, just maybe, there was something more than the life we had been given.

That maybe there was a God who saw us, who loved us, who had not forgotten us.

By early 2008, there were 12 of us.

We called ourselves a church, though we did not really know what a church was supposed to be.

We had no building, no pastor.

Though we started calling Sunung Min our pastor because he was the one who read the scripture and tried to explain it to us.

He had only known Christ for two years himself, but he was all we had.

We shared one Bible among 12 people.

We tore pages out carefully and each person took a few pages to memorize before we passed them on.

We could not risk everyone having pages at the same time.

If one of us was searched and caught, at least the others would be safe.

We learned hymns from Mr.

Choi, who had learned them from Christians in China.

We sang them so quietly, barely breathing the words, “Amazing grace, how great thou art.

Nothing but the blood of Jesus.

” We did not know the tunes were supposed to be loud and joyful.

We sang them like laabis, like secrets, like prayers whispered in the dark.

I remember the first time we took communion.

Sung Min had read about it in the Bible and wanted us to do it, but we did not have wine or bread.

We used water and a few grains of rice.

Sungmin held them up and said the words he had memorized.

This is my body broken for you.

This is my blood shed for you.

Do this in remembrance of me.

We passed the cup.

It was really just an old thin container.

And we each took a tiny sip of water.

We each took a single grain of rice and let it melt on our tongues and we wept.

I do not think there was a single person there who did not weep because we understood maybe for the first time what it meant that Jesus had died for us that his body was broken that his blood was shed in a country where people disappeared every day where bodies were broken in prison camps where blood was shed for the smallest crimes.

We understood what it cost.

The meetings became the center of my life.

I lived for those nights when we gathered, when we could be honest about our doubts and fears, when we could pray for each other, when we could hear the words of scripture and remember that we were not alone, that God was with us.

Sunung min grew into his role as our pastor.

He studied the Bible constantly.

He asked questions of the Korean Chinese Christians he met on his trips across the border.

He brought back small bits of information, fragments of theology, pieces of wisdom.

He shared everything he learned with us.

I watched him become more confident, more peaceful, more certain of what he believed.

But I also saw the weight he carried.

He knew what we were risking.

He knew that every meeting could be our last.

He knew that if we were caught, it would not just be us who suffered.

Our families would suffer, too.

That was the law in North Korea.

Three generations.

If you committed a crime, your parents and your children would be punished with you.

Your guilt became their guilt.

Sunung Min had married in 2006 before his first trip to China.

His wife Hijin was a quiet woman with a soft voice and kind eyes.

She joined our gatherings after a few months.

She was afraid at first, more afraid than anyone, but she could not deny what she saw in Sunung Min.

She could not deny the change in him.

And slowly she came to believe too.

They had their first child in 2007, a son, their second in early 2009, a daughter.

And Hijin was pregnant again by the spring of 2009.

I remember Sang Min holding his son, looking down at that tiny face, and the expression on his face was so tender it hurt to look at.

He loved his children more than his own life.

and he knew that by being a Christian, by being a pastor, he was putting them in danger.

We talked about it once, just the two of us.

It was late at night, and we had just come from a meeting.

We were walking home through the empty streets, and I asked him if he ever thought about stopping, about giving it up to keep his family safe.

He was quiet for a long time.

Then he said that he had thought about it every single day.

That he woke up thinking about it and went to sleep thinking about it.

That he looked at his children and his heart broke at the thought of what might happen to them.

But then he said something I will never forget.

He said that if he stopped now, if he denied Christ to keep his family safe, what would he be teaching his children? that it was okay to abandon the truth when things got hard.

That God could be trusted only when there was no cause.

He said he would rather his children grew up knowing their father had died for something true than grow up watching their father live for a lie.

I did not understand it then, not fully.

I was young.

I was afraid.

I wanted to tell him to stop, to be smart, to protect himself and his family, but I said nothing because I could see in his eyes that his mind was made up, that he had countered the cost and was willing to pay it.

By the spring of 2009, our group had grown to almost 20 people.

We had to split into smaller groups for safety, meeting on different nights in different places.

But once a month, we tried to gather everyone together.

Those meetings were the most dangerous, but also the most beautiful.

20 people crowded into a tiny room, singing hymns in whispers, praying for each other, sharing what little we had.

I remember one meeting in May of 2009.

It was raining outside, a heavy spring rain, and we met in an old storage building at the edge of town.

Someone had brought a bit of bread, real bread, not the corn cakes we usually ate, and we shared it among all of us.

Each person got a piece no bigger than my thumb.

Song mean stood in the center and talked about Jesus feeding the 5,000.

How Jesus took a little boy’s lunch and multiplied it to feed a whole crowd.

How there were basketfuls left over.

He said that was what God did with our faith.

We brought him so little, just our broken hearts and empty hands, and he multiplied it.

He took our small faith and made it enough.

I looked around that room at the faces of my brothers and sisters, old Mrs.

Park, who had lived through the Japanese occupation and the Korean War and the famine, and had thought she would die without hope.

Young Mi, barely 16, who had found Christ and now had a reason to live.

Mr.

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