Who was Hungarian bomb expert behind Korea’s fight for independence?

A World War I prisoner of war named Gabor Magyar, who is likely the mysterious Hungarian bomb expert who helped Korean independence fighters / Courtesy of Mozes Csoma

In the 2016 film "The Age of Shadows," a mysterious foreign explosives expert named Ludvik (Foster Burden) assists Korean independence fighters against Japanese colonial rule. Though dramatized for the screen, the character was inspired by a real yet little-known historical figure — a Hungarian bomb technician known only as “Magyar,” a word that simply means “Hungarian” in his native language.

The identity of this enigmatic foreign ally was recently unearthed by Mozes Csoma, former Hungarian ambassador to Korea and now a professor at Karoli Gaspar University in Budapest.

Through archival research, Csoma has confirmed that Magyar was not just a generic reference to a Hungarian national, as previously assumed, but likely the man’s actual surname. Csoma identified him as Gabor Jozsef Magyar, born in 1896 in Selmecbanya, who was captured by Russian forces during World War I and detained in Siberian prisoner-of-war (POW) camps.

The search for Magyar began in 2019, during Csoma’s diplomatic posting in Seoul. The Hungarian Embassy co-hosted an academic conference with Dankook University to mark the centennial of Korea’s March 1 Independence Movement. There, Csoma met Korean scholar Yang Ji-sun, who studied the elusive Hungarian figure.

“At that time, I told professor Yang that I suspect that the word 'Hungarian' (Magyar) must have been the surname of the person being searched for. Of course, this was just an assumption on my part, but after returning home from my diplomatic service, I began my research in Hungary. I also reviewed old documents from the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Hungarian Ministry of Defense in this regard,” Csoma told The Korea Times in an email interview.

"I wanted to find a Hungarian prisoner of war from World War I who was in Mongolia at the right time, went from there to Beijing and Shanghai and also had technical knowledge. Of course, during the research, there were some suspected 'candidates,' but I had to rule them all out for one reason or another. Either the location was wrong or the time was wrong. This is how I found the person who was in the searched place in the searched time, who had technical skill and whose last name was 'Magyar.'"

Application by a Hungarian man named Gabor Magyar for a Chinese domestic passport to travel from Shanghai to Zhili, now Hebei Province in December 1922 / Courtesy of Mozes Csoma

From POW to Korean independence ally

Kim Won-bong, Korean independence fighter and leader of Uiyeoldan / Korea Times file

Like many Central European POWs detained in Russia at the time, Magyar likely escaped eastward through Mongolia. It was there, according to Korean accounts, that he crossed paths with Lee Tae-joon, a Korean independence activist and physician who operated a hospital in Urga (now Ulaanbaatar). Through Lee, Magyar was introduced to Kim Won-bong, the leader of the Uiyeoldan, or Heroic Corps, a militant Korean independence group. After Lee’s assassination by Russian White Army officer Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, Magyar made his way to Beijing, connecting with Kim.

The two traveled to Shanghai, where Magyar helped establish a secret bomb-making facility in the basement of a European-style house registered under his name in the French Concession. There, he lived with a Korean assistant disguised as a cook and female resistance fighter Hyun Gye-ok, producing explosives.

According to “Yaksan and the Uiyeoldan,” a 1947 patriotic memoir by writer Park Tae-won, Magyar’s explosives were tested successfully and later used in one of the group’s most daring missions — the 1923 bombing of the Jongno Police Station in Seoul by activist Kim Sang-ok.

In "The Age of Shadows," the fictionalized Magyar is tasked with smuggling some 300 explosives into Korea, using the extraterritorial protections afforded to foreigners in colonial-era China. The mission ultimately fails due to betrayal by a mole within the resistance, but the film highlights the existence of foreign allies in Korea’s armed independence struggle.

Despite his contributions, Magyar disappeared from the historical record. Csoma sought answers in mid-20th-century Hungarian diplomatic archives, particularly those related to North Korea, which maintained active exchanges with Hungary based on shared socialist ideals. His interest was spurred by the fact that Kim had defected to the North after Korea’s liberation in 1945 and served as a high-ranking official in the 1950s.

In 1955, Kim even visited Hungary as part of a North Korean delegation as Minister of Labor and representative of the People’s Republic Party, yet according to Hungarian diplomatic archives, he made no mention of Magyar during the trip, even in informal settings.

Csoma believes this silence may have resulted from the political sensitivities of Cold War-era North Korea, where acknowledging past connections with foreign figures could expose political risks. Another possibility is ideological: if Magyar had gone on to start a business or live as a civilian in a capitalist society, Kim may have come to view his former ally as an ideological enemy.

Csoma is currently writing a book on the subject, more than half of which is already complete.

“I will continue my research because I see that there is still a lot of exciting unexplored information in the shared past of Hungary and Korea,” Csoma said.