LTI Korea 
DLKL 
SIWF 
How I Discovered Korea scrap
by Lee Ho-cheol
November 21, 2014
Author Bio 작가 소개
Lee Ho-cheol
Even as a small child I was attracted by the history and culture of far-off, unknown countries, and it cannot have been a coincidence that at university I studied history as well as Hungarian literature and language.
Combined with general curiosity, a personal experience played a role in forming my interest: My father was a surgeon, and in 1950 as a member of the first group of doctors sent to Korea he spent a whole year on the front, dropped right in the middle of the Korean War. A hospital train took the group of about 30 doctors and other health workers through Moscow and Beijing to Korea, where a hospital train equipped by the Hungarian state was waiting for them. They did not know in advance where they would be working, or in what circumstances. The train set off, joined by Korean health workers, then travelled from one unknown place to another, stopping now and again to receive the wounded, moving steadily closer to the front line. After a few months the train suffered a direct hit (fortunately they were not on board), and they were left in the middle of the front with practically no equipment, background knowledge, or contact with others. They performed operations by the light of a pocket torch; they had no food or anywhere to wash, and they tried to withdraw from the front to a calmer place. These experiences, just a few years after the end of the Second World War, were draining for all of them. And as well as the daily threat to their lives, the sight of the infinite poverty of Korean villages, the lack of development, and the starving, ragged inhabitants, took its toll on them.
All this, naturally, I learned only later, when after my father’s fortunate return home we looked at some of the surviving photographs in which they smiled into the lens, arms around the shoulders of their Korean colleagues, as if everything were all right.
Although it was a very long time before I understood the reason for the war and its history, the suffering and poverty that I had learnt of first-hand made an extremely deep impression on me. As did the fact that for years after my father’s return home, he received letters and photographs from the friends he had made there. I preserve these documents to this day: postcards, LP records, and small souvenirs.
So when a Korean translator living in Hungary, citing an acquaintance we had in common, suggested that we publish a book based on Lee Hochul’s personal experiences about the events of the Korean War, I was pleased to accept. Reading the manuscript, I finally understood the extremely complex human, social and political situation, and the Korean people’s suffering of the immeasurable trials that were unleashed on them.
The book was translated very quickly, and launched in April 2011 at one of the highest-ranking book events in Europe, the 18th Budapest International Book Festival, in the presence of the author. The audience listened most attentively to the writer's account of his experiences and of the many meetings in which he participated in countries all over the world, for Hungarian was the 10th language in which the book had appeared. After this success, naturally we will be happy to undertake publishing other Korean-themed books, particularly ones that match the publisher’s basic profile.
Déliek, északiak
Lee Ho-cheol, Balassi Publishing House, 2011
* Andrea Soóky is a director of the Balassi Publishing House. She majored in Hungarian and History at Eötvös Loránd University. Twenty years ago with others she founded Balassi Publishing House, which was one of the first private publishing houses in Hungary. She edits books about history art, music, and theatre.
Writer 필자 소개
Lee Ho-cheol
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