For four decades, Choi Byung-moon wondered whether he led a young girl to her death. But in 2020, he found himself on a path that would lead him back to the girl — and force him to question memories he had thought were as immutable as historical fact.
, Choi believed he had simply done his duty. After the truth became public knowledge, he had painstakingly avoided watching or reading anything about Gwangju, hiding his past from even his wife and three children.His awakening of conscience came in the early 1990s, when he happened to glance at a newspaper article about two boys who had gone missing during the uprising.
Choi wondered whether he would ever get the opportunity to publicly repent before he died. Then in late 2020, he received a call from a man explaining that he was with a group that was looking into the massacres in Gwangju.The man was a deputy of Huh Yun-sik, a senior investigator with the May 18 Democratization Movement Truth Commission, a newly formed government inquiry into the atrocities in Gwangju.
The hope was that these previously unheard testimonies might unearth clues that could lead to the 78 bodies that were still missing, or help conclusively tie Chun Doo-hwan to theSouth Korean soldiers drag away the body of a pro-democracy protester killed in a firefight on May 27, 1980, in Gwangju. An astonished Huh realized that Choi was talking about the minibus shooting, which his team was investigating. Huh told Choi that the young girl he’d saved was alive — and that her name was Hong Geum-suk. “The moment he heard that he broke down in tears,” said Huh. “He was finally able to let go of the heavy weight that he had carried with him all this time, even a little bit.”
Choi kneels before the cenotaph and hangs his head. “I realized then that the girl I’d saved must have been killed, so I just cried and cried,” he said. Hong, herself on the verge of collapsing, tearfully says to nobody in particular: “I wish it were really me.” Before she leaves, she hugs Choi tightly and consoles him: “Don’t hold this guilt in your heart, just put it all down.”
As it turned out, Park Hyun-suk had been one of the passengers killed in the minibus shooting that day, and she had been sitting next to Hong Geum-suk when it happened. Hong had recalled her by name in her 1989 testimony. Over the years, Hyun-ok had meticulously pieced together a timeline of her sister’s last hours, which she now began to recount to Choi. Hyun-suk had, in fact, sported a black bob, and there were photographs to prove it. And she had boarded the bus that morning with their 12-year-old brother, who had gotten off before the attack. The brother had later said that Hyun-suk was secretly volunteering with the civilian militia and was taking the bus to go look for spare coffins outside the city.
Though occasionally used in court, forensic hypnosis was no truth serum. Choi emerged from his four-hour session in a daze, recalling only the sensation of his memories lapping at the edge of consciousness but never quite breaking the surface. “We got a little more detail,” said Park Chin-un, the commission’s head of public affairs. “For example, regarding whether he held his rifle with his left or right hand, we learned that it was both hands.
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