THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

One of the favorite propaganda stunts is to reunite families that were separated by the "truce line" that brought an end to the fighting, but not to the war. The reunions are all too brief and both sides take lots of pictures and record lots of tearful conversation.

Ms. Lee had been married to Oh In-se for only seven months and was five months pregnant when the Korean War erupted in 1950. Mr. Oh disappeared into the conflict, ending up in the North when the war was halted three years later by a truce that left the Korean Peninsula divided.

The spouses did not see each other again until Mr. Oh, now a deeply wrinkled 83-year-old, showed up wearing a black fedora as part of the first reunions of war-separated relatives the rival Koreas have arranged in nearly two years.

“I can’t tell how much I missed you,” said Ms. Lee, who never remarried and raised her son alone. “I have wept so much thinking of us that there are no tears left in me.”

Mr. Oh, holding her hand, said, “My dear, I didn’t know that the war would do this to us.”

Ms. Lee and the couple’s son, Oh Jang-gyun, 64, were among 389 South Koreans who crossed the heavily armed border into the North in buses and ambulances on Tuesday to meet with 96 elderly North Koreans who wanted to reunite with long-lost relatives for perhaps the only time. Ms. Lee said that after her husband appeared to her in a dream in 1978, she gave him up for dead and began holding an annual ritual for a deceased relative.
The biggest surprise in her life came after the Koreas agreed in September to hold a new round of family reunions and she heard from the South Korean Red Cross that her husband was alive in the North, looking for her. Since then, she had been busy preparing for their meeting, digging up an old wedding photograph and buying a wristwatch as a gift. The couple’s names were inscribed on the back.

Their time was to be painfully brief. They were granted permission to be together for only 12 hours, in group and private sessions, until Thursday, when they will have to part again. On Thursday, an additional 90 elderly South Koreans will cross the border for another round of three-day reunions with 188 relatives in the North.

Wow, 12 hours after 65 years! God damn, what a bunch of humanitarians those governments are! Can we get them a Nobel Prize?