There Brothers Home (or Brothers Welfare Center) a Busan in South Korea it is sadly known for having been the scene of serious abuses And human rights violations between 1975 and the 1987. According to some, the events would have been a source of inspiration for the popular TV series Squid Game broadcast on Netflix, although the creator of the series Hwang Dong-hyuk did not confirm. Born as an orphanage in 1960 and then converted to assistance center in 1975, the facility aimed, at least formally, to re-educate homeless And vagabonds to reintegrate them into society. However, the reality was very different: out of 40,000 people imprisoned in this real concentration campless than 10% were actually homeless. There were many victims disabled people, street vendors, prostitutes or even kidnapped children, inmates to inflate the number of inmates and obtain more state subsidies, which enriched the director Park In-geun. But to clarify, we must start from 1975.
The welfare homes
In the 1975 the president and dictator of South Korea Park Chung Hee he set up a system of 36 welfare homes scattered throughout the territory. On paper, the project should have accommodated all the “unwanted”: they mainly fell into this category vagabonds And homeless who, after having been re-educated and taught a trade, would be readmitted into society.
This desire to “clean up” the country became even greater near the 1988 Seoul Olympics, since we passed by 8600 inmates in 1981 to 16 thousand inmates in 1986. Of course, this is a questionable practice, but this is not the point I would like to focus on. In fact, among all the centres, there is one which has sadly made the news due to the inhumane practices carried out within it: the Brothers Home Of Busan.
The birth of Brothers Home
Born as an orphanage in 1960, this structure in 1975 it was converted into a care centre, the largest in the entire network. He was at his helm Park In-geunan ex-military and social worker, who was supposed to manage the center in a dutiful manner, effectively re-educating everyone who entered… but as you will have understood, things went very differently. Consider that throughout its operational life the Brothers Home hosted something like 40 thousand peoplewith peaks of 4000 people at the same time – despite the maximum capacity being 500.
The motivation behind all this? Simple: the center received important events subsidies from the state – grants that mostly ended up in the pockets of its director – and which were proportional to the number of people detained. So more prisoners = more money. It is estimated that over time the director put aside an equivalent amount of assets thanks to this real concentration camp more than 90 million euros currently.
This allows us to also explain another aspect, that is, in fact less than 10% of those imprisoned were actually homeless: Most were political opponents and people who were easy to kidnap, such as children waiting for the bus, disabled people, street vendors and prostitutes.
But that’s not even the worst. I’ll just tell you that in retrospect this structure was nicknamed “the Korean Auschwitz”.
Life inside the Korean Auschwitz
The first thing to know is that the director decided to save costs not hiring competent staff to manage the facility but promoted some of them to guards more violent prisoners present in the center. These prisoners privileged they organized themselves into squadrons, recreating a paramilitary organisation. There repression, it’s easy to imagine, it was the order of the day: people often he protested because she had been trapped through no fault of her own, and everything was handled with beatings, corporal punishment and abuse. Consider that even children who were kidnapped often came literally sold abroad.
By the way, the prison director was deeply Catholic – almost an extremist one might say – and forced all the prisoners to learn Bible verses and sacred songs. And whoever forgot them, a beating.
To pass the time – and here we reconnect to Squid Game – the guards also made the inmates play violent games for the simple pleasure of entertaining themselves, although I did not find any in-depth reports detailing what challenges these were. Plus let’s add the fact that everyone was wearing one blue overalls which, actually, is quite similar to the one in the TV series. So this could be a clear source of inspiration for the series, even if in fact the director never explicitly said that he took this story as a reference.
Among other things, a small aside: these images are circulating everywhere on Instagram and TikTok. Here, these are not photos of Brothers Home – also because it was demolished thirty years ago – and they are simple images made with artificial intelligence.
To all this, which is already incredibly serious, is added the exploitation for forced labor, such as field work, construction work and the production of shoes and bags. It goes without saying that almost all of the profits obviously went neither to the state nor to the prisoners, but to the coffers of director Park In-geun. To date they have been confirmed 657 victims, but it is feared that this number, in reality, is much higher.
The end of the Brothers Home
Things of this kind were difficult to keep secret, and the relatives of the people locked up – those few who understood where their loved ones had been locked up, at least – began to raise their voices, leading to thearrest of Park In-geun In the 1987 for embezzlement and illegal confinement. Do you want to know the absurd thing? Being involved with the high offices of the state, he was only sentenced to two and a half years in prison for stealing millions of dollars in government benefits but – incredibly – was never held accountable violations of human rights.
The people, now free, began to protest and report what had happened, but the authorities at all levels ordered them to remain silent – it was a truth too inconvenient and embarrassing for the government. Do you think that the truth began to emerge only in 2012, thanks to the protests of a survivor who affected a university professor who, in turn, studied the matter in depth, bringing out the rottenness and making the state move to compensate the victims and their families.
To this day, this remains one of the darkest pages in South Korean history.
