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GARY EICHTEN: It's a minute past 12. Let's catch up on the latest headlines now. Here's Toni Randolph. Toni?

TONI RANDOLPH: Good afternoon. The two top leaders of the coalition in Iraq are sticking to plans to hand over power at the end of June. And they say they support the efforts of a UN envoy who's putting together a plan for a caretaker government. President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair met at the White House. At today's news conference, Bush also said he supports an Israeli plan to withdraw from Gaza and keep some West Bank settlements.

Bush says Palestinians who object must rise to the challenge. US officials aren't saying much about talks they held earlier today with leaders from Fallujah. These were the first negotiations since the siege of the city began April 5. A ceasefire in Fallujah has been severely strained by nightly fighting between the two sides.

Another American is in the hands of kidnappers in Iraq. Police say, in Basrah, that a businessman was taken from his hotel there. The American is originally from Jordan. It's not clear if insurgents took him or if it was the work of criminals seeking ransom.

In regional news, Governor Tim Pawlenty says he'll have more to say later today about public safety Commissioner Rich Stanek. In a deposition in a police brutality lawsuit in the early '90s, Stanek acknowledged telling racist jokes and repeatedly using a racial slur. Pawlenty says he wants to meet with Stanek to get more information. The governor says he's been aware of the concerns about Stanek's comments for a few weeks but that the explanation Stanek gave the St. Paul Pioneer Press differs from what Stanek told him.

TIM PAWLENTY: We have a state that's very proud of its civil rights background and a country that has made great progress in that. And we need to make sure that we have people in positions that understand, and appreciate, and respect people of different backgrounds. And what I read in the newspaper this morning was concerning to me.

TONI RANDOLPH: Pawlenty would not say how Stanek's explanation to him differed from what Stanek told the newspaper. Stanek is one of three Pawlenty appointees facing tough Senate confirmation hearings. Striking bus drivers are voting on a contract agreement that could end the 44-day-old bus strike. Results should be available this evening. A Northern Minnesota marine is laid to rest today in Moose Lake. Minnesota Public Radio's Bob Kelleher reports.

BOB KELLEHER: Services for Moises Langhorst were moved to the city's Catholic Church to accommodate the large number of mourners. His family attends a local Lutheran Church. The 19-year-old Marine was killed in action in Iraq, April 5. His body returned to Moose Lake this week. Langhorst graduated less than a year ago from the Moose Lake High School. Classes are in session there today, but a school official reports most of the students are attending the services. Bob Kelleher, Minnesota Public Radio, Duluth.

TONI RANDOLPH: The college student who disappeared last weekend in La Crosse apparently died of drowning. The body of 21-year-old Jared Dionne was found yesterday in the Mississippi River. The La Crosse County medical examiner says preliminary results of an autopsy indicated he died due to cold water drowning with no indication of trauma or foul play. In the weather forecast for today, it'll be mostly cloudy North with a chance of showers. Highest from the lower 50s, North. To the upper 70s in the Southeast. The current temperatures around the area in Rochester at 72 degrees, in St. Cloud at 60 degrees, and it's 67 degrees in the Twin Cities.

GARY EICHTEN: All right. Thanks, Toni. It's about four and a half minutes past 12 o'clock. A reminder that today's programming is sponsored in part by Nina and Dylan, celebrating three years of all things Jack. We welcome you back to Midday here on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Gary Eichten.

And during this hour of Midday, a couple of voices in Minnesota conversations, remarkable stories about two remarkable women. We're going to hear from Sabina Zimering in a conversation that was first broadcast on Midday a couple of years ago. Zimering, a Polish jew, survived the Holocaust during World War II, literally working under the noses of the Gestapo. She wrote a book about her experiences and now, it's a play called Hiding in the Open, running this weekend and next weekend at the Great American History Theater in St. Paul.

Also this hour, we're going to hear from Hyun Sook Han. Han survived the Japanese occupation of Korea during World War II and lived through the Korean War as well. When she came to this country, she became a prominent Minnesota social worker who paved the way for the adoption of thousands of Korean born children. To begin our program, here's Minnesota Public Radio's Dan Olson.

DAN OLSON: I talked with Sabina Zimering in her suburban Twin Cities home two years ago. Her book about her World War II experiences had just been published. Not long after the voices of Minnesota interview, Sabina Zimering's recollections were made into a great American history theater play, with the same title as her book, Hiding in the Open.

Dr. Sabina Zimering, a retired St. Louis Park physician, was born into a Jewish family in Poland. When the Germans invaded, friends working for the Polish underground gave Zimering and her sister new identities as Catholics. The German military's relentless search for Jews posing as Gentiles forced Zimering to live a nightmare existence. She was in constant fear of being discovered.

In a strange twist of fate, Zimering and her sister found refuge as workers in a German hotel occupied by German military officers. Zimering was 16 years old on the bright, clear Friday, September 1st, 1939, when sirens sounded as she and her mother returned from the farmers' market in Piotrkow, the city where they lived.

SABINA ZIMERING: So at first, I was annoyed. I thought, wow, another one of those boring things get off the street, find shelter and wait until you hear the siren again. Well, instead of that, after the siren bombs were falling, shortly after that, I heard about a boy that was older and I hoped he would notice me. He was the first victim. He was killed on the balcony. And--

DAN OLSON: They were bombing your city.

SABINA ZIMERING: Right. And this was the first day of the Second World War.

DAN OLSON: Zimering says her grandparents argued it wasn't necessary to flee the invading Germans. However, her father, a coal merchant, had been reading accounts of the persecution of Jews in Germany after Hitler came to power.

SABINA ZIMERING: So the family of five, we got a horse-drawn carriage from our hometown to Czechów, which was my favorite summer place that we couldn't go that summer. And from there, on one foot, we were just walking.

DAN OLSON: Zimering says the roads were clogged with refugees walking at night, hiding in barns or houses with farm families during the day in what turned out to be a futile bid to outpace the invaders.

SABINA ZIMERING: We were spending the night with some farmers and all of a sudden, some neighbor was running, shouting. They're here! They're here! The Germans are here. They just came out of the forest. And a group of people gathered to get the latest news. And I remember everybody was excited and loud. And my father was silent. His face was ghost white. He knew what it meant.

DAN OLSON: Zimering and her family returned to their home in what was now an occupied city.

SABINA ZIMERING: What I remember is just seeing them and hearing them. The thing that was the most frightening was the marching, the boots, somehow their-- what do you call the march? Goose step? Goose step. Yeah. They were so loud and so scary. You could hear them four blocks away that there were Germans.

DAN OLSON: Sabina Zimering says her city of 60,000 included about 15,000 Jews. She says the Germans took their homes and belongings and ordered them to move to what would become the Jewish ghetto.

SABINA ZIMERING: So they were confiscating radios, fur coats, and they took over Jewish businesses, immediately closed all Jewish schools.

DAN OLSON: Almost immediately, Zimering says, the German military began arresting Jews. The terror included beatings and patrols with attack dogs.

SABINA ZIMERING: Once, I was walking not too far from home and I could hear shouts and people running. And I knew right away what it was. It was the Gestapo man with his dog. And he was a tall, handsome man with black shining shoes with a leather whip and a dog. And he would let the dog loose and he would bite anyone he could get a hold of leaving pretty deep wounds.

And when it happened, when I was in the street, I started to run and before long, I could hear the panting and barking of the dog right behind me. And I knew that if I keep running straight, he will get me any second. So I made a quick right turn to the two apartment building entrance, and the dog kept going straight. And a few minutes later, I heard an outcry of a child.

DAN OLSON: Leaders in the Jewish ghetto plotted rebellion, but they were discovered and arrested. Zimering says as the months passed, the food supply dwindled and disease took a heavy toll. Even so, two girls, family friends who were Catholics risked arrest to visit Zimering's family in the ghetto. Their mother had been Zimering's elementary school teacher. Her mother asked the friends to help them get documents showing that Zimering and her sister were Catholic.

SABINA ZIMERING: A few days later, they were back again in the ghetto. Luckily, we were at the edge of the ghetto with right across the street was already the Polish part with a large church. So they came through the front part, which was on the Polish part of the church, came out and just went through the street and there they were. But they came. They said, yes, we talked to mother and here are three IDs. No money. They were extremely expensive. Very wealthy people somehow got a hold of them. We couldn't have never done it.

DAN OLSON: In other words, people were paying a lot of money for false IDs.

SABINA ZIMERING: Right.

DAN OLSON: And these friends, your family friends just gave them to you.

SABINA ZIMERING: That's right. They didn't ask for anything. They said, here they are, all the signatures, all the stamps. All you need to do is pick names you wanted. Paste the picture and you have it. And I remember the look that my parents exchanged. Total disbelief.

DAN OLSON: Disbelief, why do you think?

SABINA ZIMERING: They didn't expect it. It was like a miracle. They didn't dare to ask for it. And here it was.

DAN OLSON: Sabina Zimering later learned their friends, the mother and her two daughters, were part of the Polish underground, people risking their lives to resist the German occupation.

SABINA ZIMERING: Already by then, they were very patriotic. The older one was smuggling weapons. In other words, they were on false papers themselves already then and they had access to it.

DAN OLSON: Zimering says fear of discovery caused her to delay using the new false IDs. Then events forced a decision. Rumors circulated that the German extermination squad had arrived.

SABINA ZIMERING: A man, a neighbor from upstairs, came from his night shift at the railroad station, shouting, they are here! The Sonderkommando is here. They are at the station. They are still unloading.

DAN OLSON: Zimering says the family waited until nighttime to escape.

SABINA ZIMERING: Father went out, didn't see anyone guarding it, so he made a left turn. A few steps later, we were on the forbidden Polish part of town.

DAN OLSON: Subject to being shot on sight.

SABINA ZIMERING: Right. That's right. And as we split up, he said, let's not work together.

DAN OLSON: Two hours later, the Gestapo arrived at the ghetto, rousting residents, separating those who would be spared for work from those who were sent to their deaths. Zimering says her five family members found refuge where they could, sleeping in building stairwells or for a night or two with friends brave enough to shelter them. She says they wandered the city for two weeks. During the day, they tried to find places where patrols wouldn't notice them.

SABINA ZIMERING: One day, we were very happy. It was the All Saints Day, end of October, the important holiday in Poland for the Catholics. So we went into a Polish cemetery. It was the day when everybody would come and look up the graves and clean it up and dress it up and so on. So we found several graves that looked very neglected out of the way. And we spent a whole day in the cemetery feeling very secure, straightening out graves.

DAN OLSON: The family, still separated, continued wandering the city. One day, Sabina Zimering and her sister took a chance and went to the home of old friends. They were given food and a place to sleep for a few nights but to their horror, they learned their mother and brother had been discovered and arrested.

SABINA ZIMERING: And as she was coming back from the ghetto, talking to father, some Polish boys recognized them and started to run after him and yelled, Jew! Jew! And pretty soon, there was a big group and then they brought a policeman. And mother was-- and they saw mother, too. So in the commotion of all these people, mother whispered to him, run! He ran away. And they arrested her and that was it. We never saw her again.

DAN OLSON: The risk of staying in their hometown was too great. Zimering's father had returned to the ghetto. He didn't have false documents. He sent a message to his daughters that they must leave. Walk to the neighboring town. Use their false identification papers and volunteer for work in Germany.

SABINA ZIMERING: And I thought, Germany, what a crazy idea. You're running away from them. How would we go there? But he was still very well informed, he said. It was October or November of '42. The Germans began to retreat. It was after Stalingrad and there was a big turnaround in the war. So he said, Germany is now depleted of the arm. Their workforce is very-- in bad situation, so they need a lot of foreigners and they were, in fact, rounding up parts of town and just arresting people and shipping them to Germany because they needed-- they couldn't go on with the war. So anyone who volunteered was very welcomed by them.

DAN OLSON: You're listening to a Voices of Minnesota conversation on Minnesota Public Radio with Sabina Zimering, a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust. The plan to find work in Germany succeeded but Zimering and her sister lived with the ever-present danger of discovery and arrest. Was there any routine or even monotony that set in or were you constantly feeling on the edge like discovery could be literally around the corner?

SABINA ZIMERING: All right. Well, I didn't have to wait very long. The things in the factory were going well. When I was transferred to the office, my helper was a young 17-year-old German boy who just admired Hitler. He said, oh yeah, we have already most of Europe, England and America will be next and nobody can stop us anymore. And so he said, well, there are some-- I mentioned-- there are some neutral countries. What about Switzerland? He said, huh, what a joke. The neutral-- as long as it's good for us, we can march in any day. And I realized I better stop talking to him because if he-- all I have to do is make him suspicious. And so that was the end of me talking to him. But things in a lager where we lived were not going too well.

DAN OLSON: The barracks for the women.

SABINA ZIMERING: Right. The barracks, where one big open hall with bunk beds. I was on top or my sister was on top. But anyway, the transports kept coming all the time. There was still shortage in the workforce. And with every transport that was coming in, I could recognize that some of these girls were not Poles. They were Jews just like us. And I was telling it to my sister. I said, this is not safe.

DAN OLSON: Thinking that now, the chance of discovery as a group was growing with each day.

SABINA ZIMERING: Exactly. Nobody else was suspicious. I mean, the people that we work with all the hour, the women next to us, nobody said anything. So I figured, well, it's fine. Until in one of the transports arrived, what looked to me like two sisters. And again, there was nothing suspicious about it. Their looks were good. The Polish was accent free but they were very frightened. They were just cautious all the time. They were getting out of everybody's way. And I told my sister, they are Jewish and I could hear whispers about them.

DAN OLSON: So these two young women were drawing attention to themselves by the very fact that they were obviously fearful?

SABINA ZIMERING: Right. In fact, I heard some people like they were talking how they, oh, I can recognize a Jew any time. One of the things they could say was they had sad eyes.

DAN OLSON: How would that look? How would sad eyes look for somebody who thought they could tell a Jew?

SABINA ZIMERING: Well, when you run away from something like-- when I looked at those girls, I thought, well, they must have just witnessed something horrible. And they were giving themselves away by the way they looked. And that's what made me suspicious. And I remember I took quite some convincing of my sister and I insisted. I said, the way I see it, the whispers will become loud, open speaking. Somebody will let Gestapo know. They will come and find more of us. Well, she agreed.

So now, the thing was to plan where are we going, how are we getting away not to get caught out of an open lager? So we decided-- we worked in a factory Monday through Friday and half a day on Saturday. So from Saturday noon till Monday, whoever was absent wouldn't be noticed right away. So I said, we run away Friday night. By the time our foreman will see we are gone, we'll be far away.

And on the map, looking on the map, I could tell that if we went straight down south, we could reach the Swiss border. And I thought once we're there, we might be able to just get into Switzerland. And we have it made. We packed a little suitcase and left it outdoors so we then don't have to walk out with a suitcase. And we went to the railroad station of Neustadt and got the tickets and we're waiting for them to open the platform.

And all of a sudden, three or four German policemen, rushed and locked all the doors. Stopped everybody and he said, Kennkarte, ID. Everybody had to show the Kennkarte, even the Germans. So everybody was pulling out the-- in the meantime, I could see that they pulled out three young men and were dragging them to the police car, which turned out to be three French prisoners of war that planned to escape and someone informed on them. So they came to catch them. And while they were checking us and I showed them our ID, Polish women after curfew on the train, so they took us. Put us in jail.

DAN OLSON: Next morning, the police summoned their factory supervisor, a man Zimering considered kind and fair. So Mr. Ullman said, these are very good girls. They like him and their job. They don't give me any trouble. They should have talked to me first. They don't know our laws. They're not familiar. They were not supposed to do that. He said, please let them go. There is a shortage of workforce. The police released Zimering and her sister. They returned to the factory but their disappearance fueled rumors they were Jews. A friend, also a Jew using a false identity, told them it was too dangerous. They had to leave.

This time, they walked to a distant station, boarded a train, arriving in the German city of Regensburg, North of Munich. They were out of money. Throughout their ordeal, Sabina Zimering relied on her command of the German language and she and her sister's quick thinking as they fabricated stories for one set of officials or another about why two young Polish Catholic women were on the move in Germany. Their first encounter with authorities in Regensburg was nearly their undoing. The sisters went to an employment office. An official there sent them across the street to a building with a German flag. When they entered, Zimering says, she realized they had literally delivered themselves to the Gestapo.

SABINA ZIMERING: I still remember how he looked. He had-- it's just a very scary way. He was-- the eyes, darting eyes. And he was not very tall but talked fast and so on. Well, anyway, I gave him the story again and he said, stop lying. You bet it. And he hit me. A very strong hit in my face. My head shook and my pain was just spreading into my jaw and my-- and tell the truth. And it looked like he was ready to hit me again. And somebody at the door, walked in. Two other uniformed Gestapo men raised their hands, Heil Hitler. And they asked him in German, are you ready? And he looked at us. He said, yes. He got up and left.

And he told us to just stand there and wait. And I could tell that there was something major going on because there were phone ringing, the officers were coming and going, and he was put away in the middle of whatever he was doing. And before he left, he called for a woman to take us for a body search. We came back to the office. The first officer was gone. Someone else took over and another man was much milder. And again, he was too busy with other things. And he sent us back to the employment office.

DAN OLSON: The stunning and inexplicable turn of events found Zimering and her sister assigned to work as cleaners in Regensburg's top hotel, where most of the residents were German military officers.

SABINA ZIMERING: I did the hard cleaning, scrubbing the floors and the front steps, toilets and so on. And in the morning when I was scrubbing the front steps, that's when all the military people were walking by me to go to work, and they were just practically rubbing shoulders with them. And they greeted me either with Heil Hitler or Wie geht's, Fraulein. So a couple of things, one was-- and the-- was very interesting to live and work among Germans for the two, three-- when was it? From spring of '43 to-- yeah, a little over two years.

The shortage of men was very obvious among the women there. They were mothers with-- unwed mothers were made to feel like heroes. Hitler supported any woman that had a child, married or not married. He needed the-- so some-- there was-- a lot of women were unwed mothers and the grandchildren were with-- I mean, their children with the grandparents and they lived and worked in a hotel.

DAN OLSON: By 1944, Zimering says, it was plain that the war was going badly for Germany.

SABINA ZIMERING: The hotel was filled with wounded soldiers and they couldn't put them up. They were sleeping in the beautiful large ballroom. They were sleeping on the steps of the hotel. Young-- and the German soldiers that I remember seeing full of confidence and arrogance were very humble and frightened looking, bandaged heads or missing arms and so on. And with them, came a lot of civilians. First, we saw a lot of Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians that were working with them during the war and were running away with them.

DAN OLSON: Near the end, Zimering remembers the noise, confusion and the frantic efforts of the German military.

SABINA ZIMERING: In front of the Gestapo building, they were outside, on the street, on the sidewalks. They were burning stacks of papers of documents. And then it got to the point where everybody was in a shelter. The streets were empty. And finally, somebody came running to the basement and said, it's over. Do you hear the Americanas? So we ran upstairs and they're just like what I saw in Poland in '39, long caravan of tanks and buses and all kinds of equipment.

And all of a sudden, a truck turned around full of young men in uniforms that I never saw before, shouting, Hitler kaput! American soldiers. Young American boys. Hitler kaput! Schones Fraulein. Schones Fraulein. Beautiful women or young women. And cigarettes and chocolate. And came to mind the German invasion into Poland. Americans coming into Germany. I felt like jumping up and down and yelling at them, you young boys, you risked your lives to liberate us, to liberate the world but I didn't. I kept quiet. I held my sister's hand and try to hide my tears.

DAN OLSON: With their own quick thinking and courage, with the help of friends and the compassion of strangers, Sabina Zimering and her sister survived World War II, so did their brother and seven extended family members. However, their father and mother and more than 50 relatives were dead. The mother of the daughters who supplied their false papers had been arrested by the Nazis and tortured. She lived but her health was broken. After the war, Zimering stayed in touch with her friends. When she became a physician, she helped one of the sisters recover from a life-threatening illness.

When the communists took over Poland, they arrested the other sister for her work with an anti-communist group. Zimering wrote a letter explaining the young woman's wartime work in the Polish underground against the Germans. The communists released her. Years later, there was a reunion of the childhood friends. One of the sisters has since died. Sabina Zimering is still in touch with the surviving childhood friend who helped save her life half a century ago. You are listening to Voices of Minnesota on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Dan Olson.

As much as anyone alive, Hyun Sook Han paved the way for the placement of thousands of Korean-born children with adoptive families in Minnesota. Han worked for St. Paul based Children's Home Society as a social worker for 27 years. She traces her decision to become a social worker to the human suffering she witnessed during the Korean War. Abandoned children lined the road as Han left Seoul to escape the fighting. The children died from starvation and exposure. The memory of those and the children abandoned after the war motivated Han to find new families for them.

Born in 1939, Hyun Sook Han and her family lived through, first, the Japanese and then the Communist occupation of their homeland. I talked with Han at her suburban Twin Cities home. Starvation, she says, took many lives during both wars. The occupiers confiscated food for their troops. Her family survived in part, she says, because they had a plot of land for farming. Han says one day during World War II, she called to her friend, a neighbor girl, to come out and play.

HYUN SOOK HAN: My friend, my next door friend, I played all the time. One day, I called her name to play together and the mother said she died. And I saw through the wall, she was crying. Looking at the bottle of water with the soy sauce. And then cried from starvation. And so she died from starvation.

DAN OLSON: Hyun Sook Han says the Japanese required Koreans to change their names and learn Japanese in order to find work.

HYUN SOOK HAN: We only could speak Japanese in school, and my name was changed in Japanese. [? Toyota ?] [? Kensuke. ?] My car is Toyota now. So--

DAN OLSON: Even your name was changed.

HYUN SOOK HAN: Yeah, my name was all changed. And if they do not speak Japanese, they cannot have a job at the time. And my father, of course, spoke-- still speaks fluently Japanese and writing.

DAN OLSON: Han Was a child during World War II and learned later of young women kidnapped by the Japanese and forced into sexual slavery. Did this touch you? Did any young women you know end up being--

HYUN SOOK HAN: No, I was too young but we knew that neighbors were hiding. They're 16, 17 to 23 years old, unmarried girls. I didn't know why, but they were hiding those girls. So we knew something was going on.

DAN OLSON: Five years after the end of World War II Koreans were caught up in another war. Hyun Sook Han was 11 years old. She came out of school one day and saw the street filled with people.

HYUN SOOK HAN: The tons of people, flood of people like a state fair, walking, walking. And the children were crying, saying hungry, and they were just all walking down to Seoul. So I asked them, where are you going? They said, south. Why? North Korea attacked the South Korea. What is attack? Oh, we have to move away. Otherwise, we are going to die.

DAN OLSON: North Korean troops overran Seoul. Han, her brothers, sisters, mother and grandmother, along with others, raced out of the city and took refuge under a bridge for the night. She says bullets flew all around them. The fighting abated. The families began filtering back into the city and encountered the communist occupiers.

HYUN SOOK HAN: I thought the communists looked very red looking, but they were like us and they spoke the same Korean and only uniform was different. And they were fine and they were--

DAN OLSON: Fine meaning they were not cruel or?

HYUN SOOK HAN: Not in the beginning. They thought good songs, which was real energetic compared to South Korean songs, and they were very kind and helpful in the beginning. And then slowly, we found out the neighbors' fathers were disappeared, kidnapped and killed and just gone.

DAN OLSON: The men were around--

HYUN SOOK HAN: Men were around, were all gone. My father hidden someplace, so he was fine. My father's younger brother, who was still working, was pushed to be drafted voluntarily, they said. And he said to big brother, should I volunteer? And my father said, no, you have to stop going there anymore and you have to hide it. So he was hidden. So they were fine. But few stayed too long, not hiding or even they were hiding, but if they were famous people like artist or any famous treasure people, they were all kidnapped. So they were gone. Never came back.

DAN OLSON: Han says there was a fierce battle all around her when US troops attacked the North Korean occupiers. During lulls in the fighting, she and her grandmother walked by the strange-looking troops from the United States. Han says many Koreans had never seen people who looked different from them.

HYUN SOOK HAN: So my grandmother took us, took four of us and walked. And I saw those soldiers both sides and they took off their tops and pulled the water because it was so hot. They had no shower and no shaving, so they all looked like grandfathers. In Korea, only the older people, grandfather grows their mustache. And then they had arms and chest full of hairs. So we never saw such a hair from the body. And so I asked my grandma, grandma, grandma, what's that? I didn't know there were people. So-- and then she said, oh, they are human beings from western country.

And I said, then why did they have a hair on body? And my grandmother never educated and we didn't have books, nothing. We just knew there is America. They are western countries. That's all what we knew, but we never knew how they look. And then-- but she said to me, oh, they are not civilized yet that's why they have hairs on whole body, just like monkey. Oh. But because they are not civilized, they are physically very strong and they are helping us and it doesn't matter. They look like monkey or not, we were very appreciative to them. So that was the first time. And also, they were different colors, too. And I never saw those different colored people.

DAN OLSON: You're listening to a Voices of Minnesota conversation with Hyun Sook Han, a Minnesota social worker and survivor of two wars in her homeland of Korea. Early in January 1951, Han says, everyone was ordered to leave their homes in Seoul. The result was a harrowing and, for many, fatal two and a half week trek to Korean refugee camps farther South. Han says her mother had just given birth.

HYUN SOOK HAN: Every house was opened by police officers and army troops, the South Koreans. And they kicked us out. So we had to move to South. Evacuate. And my mother even couldn't function yet. She lost a lot of blood, so she couldn't move and nothing she could do. She only hardly could walk. And so I put that newborn baby on my grandmother's back with some-- tying the blankets. And I put my two and a half year old sister on my back and my other two siblings had to walk. And we couldn't bring too much. Just a few clothing. And we were six of us, six spoons. That's all what I--

And the money in under our shirts. We made the pockets and that's all we moved down with the thousands and-- oh, millions of the citizens down to South. One day after, baby girl died. Of course, it was cold, number one. And my mother didn't eat anything, so no breast milk coming. And we couldn't even do anything about that. And I felt so lucky because I didn't love that baby yet. And I was young and she was a burden for me. So only my mother cried. And I said, mother, after war was done, we will come back and find out her body and move to our neighbor. And she said, no, it cannot happen. So she cried.

And then the snow really was a heavy snow came that year, that winter. And we had to keep walking. We were last batch of the refugees with the other refugees from North Korea. We were moving down with UN troops, American troops. So I could see them in walking but usually during the evening, all night. So I do not see their face or anything but very tall and huge people. When I came to America, they were not that huge. Because I was so small, I thought they were like huge, huge people.

And so we walked and walked the day and night. I was so sleepy. I just couldn't walk. Many, many times, I was holding the tree on the street and took like two seconds of sleeping and then had to continue to walk. And my sister was so heavy also. And after one week, she could not even stand up because we all starving and no exercise on my back. So she couldn't even stand up after. And night, I had to find out some straws, dried the straws and put on the snow. Then all six of us holding together and slept outside and no one lost the fingers or toes. I can't believe it.

And also, I had to go into any empty house and have to find out the food. Everybody were like theft. We go inside of any house and then find out the food. And that was all my job. And I had to feed all my families. And even we had some money, there was no place to buy anything because we were all moving down South.

DAN OLSON: Hyun Sook Han said during the evacuation, she decided she would devote her life to helping children.

HYUN SOOK HAN: During those walking, many, many children, little children who cannot walk, two toddlers were sitting on snow bank cried, just like children are sitting and watching something, just hundreds and hundreds of children crying on snow. And I wanted to abandon my own sister also. So I did a few times. I just put her down and then walk away. But then I watched her back and then I regretted and went back to her and grabbed the hull to my back again and again. So I'm sure some people, when they are under real pressure, people only care their own body, all their own life.

And also when bombs dropped wrong place, refugees were killed. So sometimes parents will kill the children left over. Sometimes, children were killed, the parents left over, and still tons of people were walking. And I loved my sisters, brothers. So I could not pass through leaving those crying children, so I whispered to them, I will come back to help you later.

But as my age, I didn't know they were going to die in a few hours. I never thought they could die and no one could take care of them. But so many hundreds of children I had to pass. So whenever those children were crying, I couldn't watch them. So I just only could see the crowds to walk, just moved.

DAN OLSON: After the war, Han says Korea's economy was devastated. Starvation was rampant. Families had been split apart. She says abandoned children lived on Seoul's streets. The country had no child welfare system. Han says American troops and a few religious groups tried to help. A Catholic order started an orphanage at a convent.

HYUN SOOK HAN: Orphan children were raised. Only girls, not the boys. Boys could have-- the boys could be servants or something. They could walk, work but girls couldn't. So convent had some orphanages. They had some orphans. I found out that was from government papers, but we did not know about those. And those American soldiers, they were very good Christian. They just could not watch those street boys or girls. They made a little camp kind of building and asked one of Korean Christian become a director of orphanage director.

And they collected the leftover, their food and brought them. And that was good food. And also every paid time, they collected the money and they also wrote to their parents in the States to send used clothing and some money. So they bought some food and many poor Korean people abandoned the children at the door of orphanage. That's the only way to survive for their life. So that was the beginning of abandonment started. Otherwise, children all died.

DAN OLSON: When the worst of the Korean War subsided, Hyun Sook Han and other Korean youth went back to school. She says classes were disrupted for two years. Students and others took to the streets to protest every day. They demanded the country not be split into North and South. After high school, Han says she was one of very few Korean women attending college. She graduated from a college in Seoul, started by a Methodist women's group, the only institution offering a social work degree. After college, she helped place Korean children for adoption in her home country.

Hyun Sook Han emigrated to the United States in the mid '70s and went to work for Children's Home Society, one of the state's largest private nonprofit child welfare agencies. Han's experience and her wide range of contacts in her homeland helped Children's Home Society expand the placement of Korean-born children for adoption in Minnesota. However, Han says some in Korea detested the thought of Korean children being sent abroad. What were people worried about in Korea that would happen to the children?

HYUN SOOK HAN: Number one, that time, 1975, when I came, I came to Minnesota. They still believe the children are not treated well here and so--

DAN OLSON: They'd be beaten and starved.

HYUN SOOK HAN: That's right or some people even thought American wanted to make them servant.

DAN OLSON: Yes. Yes. Put them into servitude.

HYUN SOOK HAN: Yes. Or they are going to be discriminated even by family members also, not only society. So I came and I saw it is going very well. And I wanted to show that to Korean people directly.

DAN OLSON: What were those first adoptions like? The first children, the first Korean-born children to come to Minnesota?

HYUN SOOK HAN: That was long before I came. I think those American children started to come from 1965 or 1966 to Minnesota already. So there were quite a few children in Minnesota already. And so as soon as I came, we started to have teenager groups of Korean-born children. And I cooked Korean food for the night. They are going to meet-- because they never had Korean food ever since they came. They loved it. They came to the meeting for eating and I cooked at my home and brought it over. So that was my work.

DAN OLSON: How many children do you think are still in orphanages in Korea?

HYUN SOOK HAN: During the war time, we had like 60,000 children in orphanages or group homes, and I think there are still 20,000 children are in group homes or orphanages, but they are not adoptable. Korean government said they could afford orphanage children, so they stopped orphanage children to be adopted since last 13, 14 years. But they only could send the children for adoption who were relinquished by birth parents, directly to the agency.

DAN OLSON: And this might still be several thousand children?

HYUN SOOK HAN: Oh, yes, several thousand every year. But they cut down those numbers pretty high because more people are adopting in Korea by Korean families.

DAN OLSON: Why is that happening, do you think?

HYUN SOOK HAN: I think because they are not going to have a birth children too many. But they wanted to adopt one. In that way, more children are adoptable there and plus, less children are born compared to before.

DAN OLSON: I'm assuming you have gone back with some of the Korean-born children who have been placed in Minnesota when they've gone back to look for their biological parents in Korea and what has happened? What are some--

HYUN SOOK HAN: Some societies started to have Korea trip, Korean tour since 1986 as a service program. And it is really emotional work. To find out. birth parents is a lot of work. Korean agency cannot send out people to visit the area so, so many times, they cannot locate the parents. And I know how to do it. I use my friends and relatives or any possible people in the area and then find out the roots and found many, many birth parents. So they met each other.

DAN OLSON: Do you think it's a good idea for the children?

HYUN SOOK HAN: Yes, it was. Number one, I found out some birth parents were married couple. They were too much starvation going on, so they could not help this baby. That's why they have been better now and have been worrying about this baby, had a great guilt feeling. They wanted to find those people just to think we are the angel from the heaven. And it's wonderful, wonderful things happening for those families.

But not always that way. Some we cannot find. We only found some siblings. Sometimes, we found single mom, young single mom at the time who married and did not share this baby to the husband or husband's family. It is dangerous. And sometimes even it's dangerous, I pushed them to meet. Why? Because it really helps children. Children always had the feeling "you abandoned me" but they didn't abandon the children because of the situation. Why? Because in Korea, the background of the birth make a big difference with the schools, neighbors, societies, and marriage. It's horrible. And they also--

DAN OLSON: You mean a child's bloodline, a child's heritage is an important issue?

HYUN SOOK HAN: Very important. And legally, if a child has no legally married father with the mother, child shows illegitimate child forever on the paper. And then good family background, the children do not marry those people. And also with that birth certificate, they have to bring those papers to kindergarten, grade school, junior high, senior high, all the schools until PhD and it goes to the army, it goes to the jobs. If you change it 10 times, you have to show that birth certificate 10 times, so not like in America. Korea use that all the time. It shows only mother's name, no father's name.

DAN OLSON: Is this changing in Korea?

HYUN SOOK HAN: No, still same.

DAN OLSON: There might be some people who would say, well, the children, the Korean-born children should find a way to stay in Korea. This is their heritage. This is their culture. This is where they were born. It's important to them. They come to a place like this, Minnesota, which is mostly white, they will be accepted. Of course, they will thrive and they will grow but it won't be the same as being in their home country.

HYUN SOOK HAN: Like I told you, I was working adoption agency in Korea. I went through almost 300 orphanages to find out newborn baby boys. And when I went to one orphanage, there were only girls in one room, about 70 children under five years old, three to five. And when I opened the door, they were shouting something, but I didn't understand what they were shouting. So I asked the orphanage director what they are shouting and orphanage director said, their own name. Why? They wanted to be adopted by me. They thought I'm there to adopt, to select among 70 children, one child.

And that really struck me. I said, gee, I have to find out homes for all those children as long as I live. And also, when I saw those children during the war, they were dying on snow. Starvation and frozen to death. They need families. And that time, orphanage was very poor and children were sitting and hanging around just by themselves and banging their head on the walls because that's the only thing they could do there. So it was so sad. Children were really big. They had-- all the teeth are shown, but they were laying down, couldn't move because of starvation.

DAN OLSON: 64-year-old Hyun Sook Han has officially retired from Children's Home Society. However, her commitment to child welfare remains undiminished. She's turned her attention to North Korea. It's where her late husband was born. She has relatives by marriage living there and has visited some of them. She declines to speak about the political differences between the two Koreas. She's very concerned about the welfare of North Korean children in the country's orphanages.

HYUN SOOK HAN: When I went to North Korea, I insisted I have to visit the orphanage. And after that, I came back 1997. Adoptive parents wanted to hear the story. So I gave those stories out and people collected the money. And we spent quite a bit of materials, mainly the food, milk, and sugar, and grains to orphanages three different times. And we still have some money coming in and that is happening. So I always talk about international adoption to them and I hope they are thinking child welfare instead of only collecting the things. And so my passion is still with the children.

DAN OLSON: Mrs. Hyun Sook Han, thank you so much for your time. What a pleasure talking to you.

HYUN SOOK HAN: Thank you very much. I was very happy to do this.

DAN OLSON: Hyun Sook Han, a retired Children's Home Society social worker. She's helped place thousands of Korean-born children with Minnesota families. She'll be honored on April 29 and May 1 for her work. Details of the events are on the Children's Home Society website at chsm.com. Dan Olson, Minnesota Public Radio.

GARY EICHTEN: Of course, if you tuned in late in the first half of the program, Dan interviewed Sabina Zimering. A play about her life as a young Jewish girl during the Holocaust called Hiding in the Open is now running at the Great American History Theater this weekend and next weekend as well. Sunday is Holocaust Remembrance Day. Both of Dan's interviews are available on our website if you'd like to listen to them again or if you know somebody who wasn't tuned in today who would enjoy listening to these interviews.

They're available on our website, minnesotapublicradio.org. Matter of fact, all of our Midday programs are available on our website. Just go to minnesotapublicradio.org, go to the Program tab and then click on Midday. That does it for our Midday program today. I'm Gary Eichten. Thanks so much for tuning in. Sara Meyer is the producer of our program. Christina Shockley is our assistant producer. And we had help from Laura McCallum and Annie Baxter. We'd like to thank them for their assistance.

On Monday, among other things, well, at noon on Monday, we're going to hear from King Abdullah of Jordan. He is speaking, even as we speak, at the Commonwealth Club of California, talking about Middle East peace. That's coming up Monday on Midday.

LISA MULLINS: The Madrid bombings put Europeans on alert. US allies are being targeted. Britain, America's senior partner in the Iraq war, is bracing for retaliation. As Prime Minister Tony Blair visits President Bush, Londoners worry that ties to Washington make an attack on them inevitable. I'm Lisa Mullins. Nervousness in London next time on The World.

GARY EICHTEN: 7 o'clock tonight here on Minnesota Public Radio. You're tuned to 91--