Kunga Kim
85 years old
(DOB 1926)
• Resident at the House of Sharing
Biography
Kim Gunja was born in 1926 in Pyeongchang City, in Gangwon Province of Central Korea. She was born to a father who married past forty after living a secluded mountain life in pursuit of Taoist enlightenment, and to a mother who was just fifteen when she was wed. She was the first born of three daughters. Her father died when she was just nine, and four years later her mother left the world as well, and so she and her little sisters were scattered among the houses of their relatives. She lived as the foster daughter of a policeman, until in 1942, at the age of seventeen, thinking that she was being sent on an errand by the policeman, she was sent to a "comfort station" in Hunchin, Manchuria. She remained there as a "comfort woman" of the Japanese military until the end of the war. After the war, she returned to Korea. She sold clothes and worked as a domestic servant. She lived for a while in a temple as a Buddhist devotee and later converted to Catholicism.
Testimony
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