SEOUL, South Korea — In 1997, 22 years after Choi Wook-il’s fishing boat was seized by North Korea, members of Mr. Choi’s family in South Korea received their first word from him. The letter, relayed through China, was addressed to Mr. Choi’s brother because Mr. Choi assumed that his wife had long since remarried. He asked his brother to look after her and their four children.
Then he added: “I see birds flying freely in the blue sky. I see fish swimming freely in the blue sea. Why can’t people travel freely?”
When she read this, Mr. Choi’s wife, who had not remarried, knew at last not only that he was alive, but also that he wanted to escape. It took nearly a decade, with several failed rescue missions, but she finally succeeded in helping him escape late last year.
Still, there are few unreservedly happy endings to stories of families caught up in the Korean divide: Mr. Choi’s reunion with his wife, Yang Jong-ja, and their children meant abandoning a second family he had formed in the North.
Thousands of South Korean families are still waiting to hear from loved ones taken to North Korea as prisoners during the Korean War more than half a century ago or kidnapped in the decades that followed.
About 500 South Korean soldiers captured during the war are thought to be alive in the North, with 480 civilians, mostly fishermen, who were kidnapped in the years since, according to the South Korean government. It is unclear how many of the estimated 80,000 civilians who were taken to North Korea during the war may still be alive.
Only a few dozen have returned. Many of them, like Mr. Choi, now 67, made their way home in perilous smuggling operations.
The fate of the abducted South Koreans remains an emotional issue. Since the groundbreaking meeting between President Roh Moo-hyun’s predecessor, Kim Dae-jung, and Kim Jong-il in 2000, South Korea has repatriated 63 convicted North Korean spies, increased aid to the North and expanded trade relations.
But the South Korean government has been reluctant to challenge North Korea’s denials that it had abducted any South Koreans, even though Kim Jong-il admitted in 2002 that North Korea had kidnapped 13 Japanese citizens, and released 5 of them. The North says it takes the matter seriously but seeks a nonconfrontational resolution.
“When President Kim came to Pyongyang, I had high expectations of seeing my family again,” said Mr. Choi, now 67, before Mr. Roh and Mr. Kim held their first meeting in North Korea in early October. “But it didn’t happen. This time, I hope President Roh will remember there are still people like me in the North.”
Mr. Roh said he raised the issue with Mr. Kim, but they were unable to reach an agreement.
On Aug. 18, 1975, Mr. Choi’s trawler was headed to Jumunjin, on South Korea’s northeastern coast, when it was intercepted by a North Korean gunboat.
A South Korean search party returned after five days, without finding the boat or the 33 crew members. They were believed to have been lost at sea.
As is usual in such cases, the North Koreans would not allow the boat’s crew members to leave, or tell their families they were alive. After a year of ideological indoctrination, Mr. Choi was assigned to a collective farm.
“The difficult part was that I had once lived in a free country,” he said. “In the North, you cannot move freely. You have to attend a self-criticism session every 10 days. You have to plant your rice strictly according to party guidelines. No flexibility is allowed.”
In 1979, his hopes of going home diminishing, Mr. Choi married a North Korean widow with two daughters. They had a son, now 28, and a daughter, 26.
In Jumunjin, occasional visits by the police inquiring about her husband led Ms. Yang to suspect that he was alive, though fortune tellers told her he was dead.
“I was just busy scratching out a living,” she said. “I tried my hand at every menial job: pulling coal carts, laying bricks, peddling dried fish and vegetables.
“Then the letter arrived.”
In 1997, North Korea was gripped by a famine that left as many as two million people dead. The government eased border controls, allowing people to seek food in China. Mr. Choi saw a chance to contact his family.
When his North Korean wife secured a permit to visit relatives in China, he gave her the letter to send to his brother. Shortly after receiving the letter, Mr. Choi’s brother died.
“Whether he knew it or not,” Ms. Yang said of her husband, “I was now his only hope.”
Ms. Yang turned to an advocate for divided families, Choi Sung-yong, the son of a fisherman thought to have been abducted.
In 2000, Choi Sung-yong began using his North Korean contacts, who communicated by cellphone, to find out whether Choi Wook-il wanted to escape.
North Korea often punishes people who try to flee with incarceration, or even execution. When the first messengers arrived, Mr. Choi said, he feared he was being set up. He said he had no choice but to report some of them to the police.
Surveillance was tightened around his home, and four messengers were arrested.
In 2004, a woman brought him a letter from Ms. Yang, saying that she was in China and wanted to meet with him.
Mr. Choi sent the woman away. But he said he read the letter three times, memorizing every line. Then he burned it without showing it to anyone — not even his North Korean family, for fear that they could be considered accomplices if things went wrong.
By 2006, under pressure from Ms. Yang, Choi Sung-yong was growing impatient. “I told my messengers: ‘I don’t care how you bring him out. Just do it, even if you have to put him into a sack,’” he said.
The 10th attempt to make contact came last December, when a man and a woman arrived at Choi Wook-il’s home.
This time, Mr. Choi decided to take the chance. He told them to meet him in a local market the next morning. They gave him a forged travel permit.
When he left, he did not tell his North Korean family where he was going. “I said I would be gone just for a few days,” he said. “I believe my family has been banished from our village because of me.”
Mr. Choi and his two escorts crossed into China on Dec. 25, having bribed border guards. The next day, as Ms. Yang was taking a break from her job cleaning apartments, she received the call from Mr. Choi. After three decades, they could hardly recognize each other’s voices.
“To confirm that I was her husband, she asked where we used to live and what kind of work we did together before I went to the North,” he said. “When I told her how in the early, difficult days of our marriage, we used to sell dried persimmons in the market, she just cried.”
On Dec. 31, Ms. Yang was reunited with Mr. Choi in a safe house in Yanji, a Chinese city near the North Korean border.
“Nothing was left of the young man I had sent off to sea; he was so thin,” she said. “But he still had his old nose, eyes and lips. We hugged each other and cried.”
After Mr. Choi’s escape was reported by the press, he was taken in by the South Korean Consulate in Shenyang, China. In January he arrived in South Korea.
Leaving the North was “like emerging from the dark,” he said. But whenever he sees his South Korean children’s clothes and Ms. Yang serves meat, he said, he recalls the privations his family in the North is suffering.
Ms. Yang said that she felt sorry for Mr. Choi’s other wife, who has now lost a husband, and that she hoped that she and their children could come to the South.
“I once asked him whether the North Korean woman was on his mind,” Ms. Yang said. “He just said no, then turned away and didn’t say anything more.”
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