Dedicated to the Class of 1949
By Dan Pak
The foreboding signs of trouble were everywhere. The propaganda machines of North Korea were churning out venomous threats against the South ― a young Republic of Korea only a year old. The Communist guerrillas infested the countryside like worms wiggling in a festered wound. The streets of Seoul were overflowing with refugees from the North. Their undernourished, anxiety-driven desperate faces told the story of a narrow escape from the ruthless Communists.
Despite all of this, we were happy as we swelled with the pride of victory. We had won the battle of a rigorous selection process for admission into the nation's top, ivy-league university. Reputable high schools all over the country had selected their cream of the crop and recommended them for the competitive admissions exam. One out of four test-takers were admitted into our class of 1949 pre-med school in the Severance Medical College at Yonhee University in Seoul. Two schools were later combined into Yonsei University, as the school is now known.
However, our self-indulgence was short-lived. Immediately after the welcome ceremony for freshmen, Professor Yi Yong-woo, dean of the Pre-med school, dropped a bombshell on us: He said that nearly half our class would be eliminated by the end of the first semester in an effort to trim down the class to only those who could withstand the rigor of the forthcoming intensive study. We learned later ― to our amazement ― that he meant what he had said. Nearly half of our class was dismissed after an exam at the end of the semester, reducing our class to only 35 students.
We hit the books, a lot of books. Survival in our classes was the name of the game. How to survive the cruel winnow was the impending problem. But little did we know at the time that ``survival" was to be the running theme for all of us for the rest of our lives. In the early dawn hours of Sunday, June 25, 1950, ``the day of infamy" for our people began. The North Korean Army struck the South all along the 38th parallel.
It was only three days before Seoul fell to the advancing invaders. The class of 1949 was scattered to the four winds. The North wind laid waste and uprooted the garden that had been so carefully cultivated and nourished. In 1952, when Yonhee University opened its wartime, temporary campus in Busan, I counted only a handful of classmates from the original 35-member class of 1949. We met at a makeshift tent class ― the lucky survivors.
Today, nearly 60 years later, some scenes from the class of 1949 resurface behind my closed eyes, pause for a while as still pictures, and slide back again into fossilized memory. For some of us who survived the scorch of the war and the resulting struggle through turbulent years, life's journey has nearly come to an end. Only a handful of students reached the final goal of becoming a physician. And the rest of us who didn't make it through were not seen since the fateful day in June of 1950; they left behind the youthful image perpetually transfixed in our saddened memory.
My dear fellow classmates of 1949! Do you remember Professor Kim Do -sung's English class? Do you remember his impassioned gesture cutting through the air when he recited Lord Alfred Tennyson's ``Crossing the Bar?"
Sunset and evening star,
Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark
Farewell, my friends! We will meet again soon. When we do, we will share our life's stories whether as a physician or as a perpetual student whose unfulfilled dreams were never completely forsaken but still hover over the woods and hill of Yonhee.
The writer is a Korean War veteran who now lives in the state of Georgia. He can be reached at dc.p@mindspring.com.