It would probably not be an exaggeration to say that the community of North Korean escapees in the South did not become prominent until the 1990s. With a rapid increase in numbers, their testimonies became the primary method of studying North Korean society.

Yet, the history of this community precedes the 1990s by decades, and in this column, I would like to focus on some prominent people who fled from the North to the South during the Cold War.

Any historical study is supposed to formally have limits: when the period of study begins and ends. In this case, one