Politics

Jo Ok Hui was the first woman who was awarded the title of DPRK Hero in the country.

During the Fatherland Liberation War (June 1950-July 1953), she inspired women in her county to supporting the front and took part in several battles while preparing meals for an advancing unit of the Korean People’s Army.

When the strategic temporary retreat began, she entrusted her beloved son to her mother and volunteered to join the Jinamsan people’s guerrilla unit before others.

She always assumed difficult duties voluntarily and performed many feats in mercilessly crushing the US imperialists and class enemies.

Then one day, she was arrested after being wounded in a battle against the enemy “punitive forces” that launched an attack on the guerrilla unit to “annihilate” it.

The enemies employed all sorts of atrocious torture to her for over ten days in order to find out the secret of the guerrilla unit, but they could not break her faith.

At an execution site, she sang the immortal revolutionary hymn “Song of General Kim Il Sung” to terrify the enemies and shouted, “I die as a member of the Workers’ Party of Korea. We will win as there is the Party. Long live General Kim Il Sung! Long live the Workers’ Party of Korea!” She died at the early age of 27.

Jo was born as the eldest of nine brothers and sisters into a tenant farmer’s family in September 1923.

Her father served as a servant of a landlord before Korea’s liberation and she grew up actually experiencing poverty and starvation.

She was unjustly beaten because she wore the traditional Korean clothes chima and jogori and suffered the sorrow of a stateless nation, which was far worse than starvation.

She married a mine worker, but her husband who had been like a pillar to her died unexpectedly, and she had to live a miserable life. She greeted the turn of her destiny with the liberation of the country.

The state gave her land, let her study and put her forward as an official.

The heroine lived in the embrace of the DPRK for only some years, but it was the whole of her life that could never be lost.

Jo Ok Hui, who lived as an ordinary woman linking her destiny with that of the country, was awarded the title of DPRK Hero, the top honour of citizens, for the first time among Korean women on March 7 1951.