A Hero’s Welcome After 43 Years : Community: South Korean soldier Chang-Ho Cho, who finally made a dramatic escape from North Korea, is greeted in Los Angeles.

Chang-Ho Cho saw his mother for the last time 45 years ago, when she came to see him at a train station in Seoul with his favorite rice cakes as he went off to war.

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Cho, then a college freshman, had volunteered to defend South Korea, which had been invaded by North Korea on June 25, 1950.

“Mother stood on the platform, watching the train for the longest time,” Cho, 65, recalled wistfully this week in Los Angeles.

As the train slowly pulled away from the station and his mother’s figure became smaller, then faint, and finally disappeared, he clutched the rice cakes and spoke to her in his heart: “Mother, it won’t be long. The war will be over soon, and I’ll be with you again.”

But the Korean War lasted a lifetime for this soldier, and he never saw his mother again.

Less than a year after their parting, the son was captured as a prisoner of war and taken to North Korea. He was forced to remain in that country for 43 years until his dramatic escape to the South last fall. His mother died in the South, brokenhearted and not knowing the fate of her son.

Cho, the first South Korean POW to escape from North Korea, was invited to Los Angeles by a Koreatown-based veterans association to help commemorate the 45th anniversary of the Korean War this week. The observance will culminate today with an 11 a.m. ceremony at the Korean Pavilion and Friendship Bell in San Pedro.

His arrival in Southern California, home to 500,000 ethnic Koreans, has been big news in the community. Everywhere he goes, Koreans give him a hero’s welcome with words, applause and sometimes tears. In turn, he bows, accepting the outpouring of his peoples’ affection and shared sorrow of their divided homeland.

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Cho is a frail man now and looks every bit his 65 years. He limps slowly with the help of a cane. He can no longer see out of his left eye, and he speaks with difficulty because of the two strokes that left his right side partially paralyzed. And his lungs are shot from working in the North Korean coal mines where he was sent after his release from prison. Even then, he was kept under surveillance.

Yet he exudes the peaceful meekness of a Buddhist monk who has spent a lifetime meditating, not the attitude of a prisoner who was subjected to physical and mental torture for refusing to cooperate with North Korean authorities trying to recruit him as a spy.

His facial expressions and gestures convey no trace of bitterness. Not even when he speaks of his lost youth, quashed dreams, failing health, broken marriage and several lives spent in “hell.”

And, despite the wrenching hardship that has been his since 1951, when he and a fellow South Korean soldier, looking for food, ran smack into a house full of Chinese soldiers allied with the North Korean Army, he says he is grateful to God.

“Through all those 43 years, God never abandoned me,” he said. “He helped me keep my faith. That’s why I was able to remain sane.”

The old soldier, interviewed in Korean, speaks softly and slowly. When a painful subject, such as the fate of his three adult children still in North Korea, is broached, he looks down momentarily, as if to picture them in his mind.

“If God could see me through the 43 years of my unspeakable suffering, he will watch over my children until we meet again.”

Until they meet again?

“Yes,” he replies. “In my lifetime. Now that I am in the Free World, I believe more than ever that the two Koreas will be unified.”

The fate of Cho, emanating from the partitioning of Korea, underscores the unrequited wish of 75 million ethnic Koreans worldwide to be reunited.

Korea, coveted by Japan for centuries, became its colony in 1910. When Japan surrendered in World War II 50 years ago, Koreans regained their homeland, only to have it split by the United States and the Soviet Union. What had been anticipated as a temporary division at the 38th Parallel to receive the surrender of the Japanese troops became permanent.

Half a century later, the Korean peninsula is one of the last remaining legacies of the Cold War. Technically, the two Koreas are still at war, having never signed a treaty to end the civil war, which lasted from 1950 to 1953. The United States, which fought to retain freedom in the South, lost 54,246 lives. More than 2 million Koreans died.

After his capture in 1951, Cho was moved constantly from one North Korean detention center to another. Because he was an officer from an upper-class home and a Christian, North Koreans did not trust him.

What little rapport Cho had with his captors evaporated after he tried to escape twice, for which he was sentenced to 13 years in prison at hard labor.

In prison, he met a female inmate, also from the South. When he was released for good behavior in August, 1964, and assigned to the coal mines in North Pyongyang province, he married her.

Working conditions were unfit for humans, he said. He became so ill that he vomited blood. An underground accident nearly killed him, and his right leg was crippled.

His marriage ended after five years and three children. “From the start, the marriage was very difficult because we were under constant surveillance,” Cho recalled. “My wife had been ordered to spy on me, and I was ordered to spy on her.”

After the divorce, he was exiled to a remote part of the country near the Amrok River at the border with China.

He raised his three young children in a one-room shack.

He had no way of knowing what went on outside his village, except that life in the South had to be preferable to conditions in the North. But for an occasional Korean vendor from the Jilin region, where more than half of the 2 million ethnic Koreans in China live, he had no contact with people from elsewhere.

In the fall of 1990, a Korean peddler from China named Lee made the rounds in the village. Nearly two years had passed since the Seoul Olympics, and relations between South Korea and China had become much more open. South Koreans were visiting Yenpien, the Korean population center in China, he told Cho.

That planted a seed in Cho’s mind.

When the peddler returned to the village the following year, Cho wrote down the names of his six siblings and the name of the women’s college where his oldest sister had taught before the war and gave it to Lee.

When Lee returned to China, he wrote his own name and his return address on a new envelope and gave it to a South Korean visitor.

In the fall of 1992, Lee was back.

Lee told Cho that his two sisters and a nephew, a reporter for a Seoul newspaper, had visited Lee in China after getting his letter.

“Your elder sister shed many tears over you,” Lee said. “Your parents have passed away, but all your brothers and sisters are doing very well.”

Lee said Cho’s elder sister had brought him gifts, including his mother’s Bible and a color picture. But he had come with only the photo in his pocket because he did not want to raise suspicions.

Then Lee lit a match. Even in the flickering, faint light, the face in the picture was unmistakably his mother’s.

“Oh, mother!” he wanted to cry out. His heart felt as if it would burst. He wanted to run to Seoul--if only he could.

It took two more years and several harrowing attempts that failed before Cho was able to cross the river to China with Lee to fetch a smuggler’s boat for freedom in the South.

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Cho set about to try to persuade his children to go with him to China-- he hadn’t dared mention South Korea--but they did not want to leave home.

On Oct. 23, 1994, a semiconscious Cho was discovered by fisheries agency officials drifting on a fishing boat off South Korea’s fog-shrouded west coast.

He was taken to a hospital, then investigated. Cleared by the South Korean authorities, he joined his family in Seoul.

A month later, a military ceremony marked his discharge from active duty. He was promoted from second lieutenant to first lieutenant and received one of South Korea’s highest honors.

Since then, TV and film offers have poured in. But the best thing that has happened to him came by way of a matchmaker, a relative who served as the pastor of Hanmi Church in Koreatown until his recent return to South Korea to teach at a Seoul seminary.

The minister remembered Shin-Ja Youn, a widow, who had attended his church faithfully. Since the death of her husband a decade earlier, Youn had operated a restaurant in Irvine, then in Huntington Beach.

The minister contacted her and asked if she might consider Cho as a prospective husband. She went to South Korea to see Cho, after consulting her adult children, two of whom live in Los Angeles.

“The first thing I felt when I saw him, was that he needed someone to help him because of his frail health,” Youn said. “I wanted to be that help.” They were married in Seoul on May 4.