Amid allegations of a corrupt adoption system in Seoul that falsified children’s records, those sent to Denmark as youngsters are desperate to find out their real stories
n the summer of 2022, Sussie Pflug Brynald, a Danish citizen, walked through the doors of Holt Children’s Services in Seoul,, looking for answers about her past. The agency had handled her adoption 49 years earlier when she was, according to Holt, a Korean orphan.
Sussie Pflug Brynald, who grew up and lives in Denmark, has been searching for information about her birth family in South Korea.The thought of never finding her biological mother, of never knowing if she has siblings, makes her sick, Brynald says. “I don’t know where to put that pain.” But, as with hundreds of other adoptees associated with the Danish Korean Rights Group , she has taken it upon herself to find a place for it.
Severing the ties to her family was the first step for Holt in obtaining legal guardianship over Brynald, which was required for the agency to broker the adoption. When the agency finally did obtain guardianship in October, it almost immediately created the statement of her release for adoption. Four months after her supposed birthdate, she was on her way to Denmark with papers stating that she was an orphan, all traces of her past removed.
“The falsified orphan family registry was very much an integrated part of an adoption system that turned children into adoptive children,” says Dr Youngeun Koo, a lecturer at the Harvard Korea Institute. “This was not an exception. This was very much what allowed 200,000 children to become adoptable.”
“If a high-schooler brought in a child back then, that high-schooler would now be in her 60s and married,” says Kim. “And she would have hidden the fact that she’d had a child previously; because with that fact her life would be over. Korea is a country that hides everything.” Jumping in, Kim says: “Back then, we really just wanted to send them as quickly as possible. All those children, 20 of them crowded in a room. Weren’t they better off going than staying here where they wouldn’t have been treated fairly?”
United Kingdom Latest News, United Kingdom Headlines
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