Occasionally, something pops up in daily events that stops you dead in your tracks. Stacey and I encountered a very simple war memorial recently that did just that.
During an early day of the recent seven day Seoul Festival, we were flitting around downtown, hopping from one merry event to another. Chuseok, Korea's major holiday, was only a day off and people were in a festive mood. Celebrations were underway everywhere.
We rounded a corner off Cheonggye Plaza heading toward Seoul Plaza. There, along the sidewalk bordering the street, stood rows of flags from countries around the world, and under them, simple easels supporting large reproductions of old photographs. The happy countenances of passerbys turned somber as they perused the photos and accompanying captions.
The memorial had been set up as a tribute to the sixty-seven nations that had come to the aid of South Korea in 1950 following the communist invasion from the north. The photos portrayed in graphic detail the brutality and devastation that had spread across Korea.
There were pictures all too familiar to mankind of displaced, famished people; strings of refugees; POW camps; and the rubble of what had previously been Seoul. They stood in stark contrast to the gleaming city readily viewed by simply raising our line of vision above the easels. It would have been so easy to hurry by and return to the festivities around the corner, but most people I saw were momentarily transfixed in front of the easels.
It is impossible to fathom the suffering that civilians and military personnel alike endured on the peninsula during the war years unless experienced firsthand. But it was easy and inevitable for Stacey and I to pause, awash in emotion, and marvel at the hardship borne by so many that allowed us to stand where we stood and experience the wonders of Korea below the 38th parallel today.
No comments:
Post a Comment