LEE KYOUNG-HEE Chaos prevailed in Korea amid the power vacuum that followed liberation in 1945. The division of the peninsula along the 38th parallel by the US and Soviet militaries came as a complete surprise to most Koreans. The December 1945 Moscow Conference of US, Soviet and British foreign ministers delivered another shock: The three powers agreed to place Korea under a four-power trusteeship for up to five years pending the establishment of an independent government.When Kim Son-hyok, then a high school senior, joined the anti-trusteeship movement that plunged the nation into a vortex of passionate resistance and ideological polarization, he had no idea of the consequences his activism would bring. Guided by a strong sense of justice, he could not have imagined the future awaiting him: a lifelong separation from his family, backbreaking labor, hunger and beatings in foreign prison camps.The 2025 book "Too Fast Too Slow: The Trials and Triumphs of Kim Sonhyok" documents the fateful consequences of Kim’s involvement in Sammindang (the Three People Party), an anti-communist student organization in Pyongyang, which was then under Soviet military occupation. On May 5, 1946, Kim was arrested at his home by plainclothes police officers, and so were all his fellow party members, before they had even embarked on any significant action.Months of confinement in various detention centers followed, along with repeated interrogations and pressure to sign a prewritten confession. Kim was eventually tried by a military tribunal of the Soviet 25th Army. He received a seven-year prison sentence, as did three other party members. Four others were sentenced to eight years, another four to 10 years, and the party leader was condemned to death.On Sept. 25 that year, Kim boarded a train bound for the Soviet Gulag in Siberia together with several hundred other prisoners, their heads shaved and each carrying a small bundle of belongings. Thus began a long journey marked by suffering and loneliness as he was transferred from one labor camp to another, felling trees, breaking stones, slicing bread and making and varnishing furniture. On more than one occasion, he contemplated ending his life.The book opens on a peaceful February morning in 1993 in the small Russian city of Volsk on the Volga River. As he prepares breakfast for his son, Valeriy, before work, Kim glances outside, as he often does, expecting the postman. And he sees an envelope being dropped into his mailbox.For reasons he cannot explain, his heart begins to race. Opening the letter, he discovers it is from a stranger — professor Kim Kun-bok, chairman of the Yekaterinburg Koryo People’s Culture and Enlightenment Society. To his astonishment, he learns that his family has been searching for him and that the letter contains the California address of his sister, Yang-hyok. The professor explains that he saw an advertisement seeking Kim in the Koryo Ilbo, published in Almaty, Kazakhstan, and that it took him six months to track him down.Thus began a correspondence between the long-separated siblings, who would meet in Kyiv, Ukraine, in April of that year. Two months later, Kim traveled to Seoul to reunite with family members and relatives, including his 90-year-old mother, in a miraculous reunion 47 years after they had been separated in Pyongyang.His father, Kim Hyon-sok, a Protestant elder, is believed to have been executed shortly after the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, along with hundreds of other political prisoners who opposed the Kim Il-sung regime.In 1996, Kim’s elder sister, Kim Kwi-hyok, published his memoir under his name, titled "47 Years From Pyongyang to Seoul." In 2024, the work received the inaugural Baekbong Korean Peninsula Culture Award, presented by the Baekbong Institute for Political Culture and Education in recognition of its "outstanding literary depiction of the moral and humanitarian disasters caused by territorial division and war."The latest English edition is largely a translation of the Korean edition by Cho Young-oak, a daughter of Kim Kwi-hyok, while also expanding the narrative through interviews with other family members, historical materials and newspaper accounts. Ken Wells, a New Zealand scholar of Korean studies and Cho’s husband, participated as co-compiler and co-editor."I cried numerous times while translating my uncle’s story," Cho writes in the preface. "My tears were for my uncle — for his fear, loneliness, suffering and hardship in those labor camps and later in exile. Now I am crying because not all stories that end well are necessarily happy ones. One cannot bring back time. One cannot erase trauma completely."I think of the thousands of Koreans in both North and South who remain separated by the DMZ. What does it take to reunite broken families and a divided country? It has been more than 75 years. Soon there will be hardly anyone left who still has firsthand memories of loved ones across the border. I feel angry that history seems to move either too fast or too slow, with little regard for a basic human need."- - -Lee Kyong-heeLee Kyong-hee is a former editor-in-chief of The Korea Herald. The views expressed here are the writer's own. — Ed.