The Untold Story of 10,000 North Korean Orphans in Eastern Europe: Interview With Director Kim Deog-Young

The story behind the award-winning film ‘Kim Il Sung’s Children’

South Korean film director Kim Deog-Young, in an exclusive interview with The Epoch Times on July 6, 2022. His award-winning documentary film "Kim Il Sung’s Children" (2020) received global recognition for covering the tragic story of North Korean war orphans in Eastern Europe in the 1950s. Lee Yu-Jeong/ The Epoch Times

In the early 1950s, more than 100,000 children were orphaned by the Korean War, but neither of the two sides, North and South, had the resources to care for them.

Orphans of South Korea were sent to the United States and Western Europe for adoption. Meanwhile, North Korea distributed its orphans across Eastern Europe to the formerly communist countries, such as Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, through “commissioned education.”