A WOMAN who witnessed two people being executed in North Korea told human rights activists in Stroud how she fled the country twice only to face slavery and starvation.

Invited by the Amnesty Mid-Gloucestershire group Ji-hyun Park, 46, answered questions from people in Star Anise about her life in North Korea at a viewing of a film made about her.

In November 2014 Sony Pictures Entertainment cancelled the release of The Interview; a comedy film made about an assassination of Kim Jong-un, when they were hacked by a group the FBI believes has links with North Korea.

Objecting to the infringement on free speech Amnesty made a short film called The Other Interview in which Ji-hyun Park talks about how North Korea is “one big prison camp”.

To escape starvation during a famine in the late 1990s Ji-hyun, along with her mother, sister and brother were forced to leave her father behind and ask traffickers to help get them into China.

After a terrible parting with her father and arriving in a foreign land she was horrified to learn that she would have to be sold if she wanted to keep her family safe from being repatriated into North Korea.

Despite being sold to a man for £500 her brother was deported and as a defector was very likely to have been sent back to one of the prison camps which litter the country.

It’s been 15 years since then and Ji-hyun hasn’t had any news of him.

For the next six years however, Ji-hyun and her mother and sister were able to stay in China living under constant fear that they might be reported to the Chinese authorities and sent back to North Korea.

During this period Ji-hyun gave birth in isolation to a baby boy she named Chol, meaning Iron.

But in 2004 she was reported to the authorities and was torn from her 6-year-old son and repatriated into a North Korean gulag.

It was the last time she saw her mother and sister.

Back in her homeland she was humiliated and forced to work all hours of the day – learning party songs and chants by night.

It was only back in North Korea that it dawned on Ji-hyun that the regime in the country of her birth was oppressive and that she had been brainwashed. She said: “That was the first time I realised that everything was a lie.”

When she was released from the prison camp after contracting tetanus in her leg she had no option but to get traffickers to take her to China again.

After much heartache Ji-hyun managed to get in touch with her son and they undertook a journey to cross the border into Mongolia in a desperate bid to avoid being deported again.

Her perilous attempt to leave China was only saved when a man helped her and her son to cut the high wire fencing which marches round the border between the two countries.

She later fell in love with the man who saved her and her six-year-old and she and her now husband Kwang Joo are still together today.

But after three days in Mongolia without water, food or a sight of another human being the three of them faced returning to China yet again.

Explaining why they decided to go back to the country they had just managed to escape from Ji-hyun said: “If we died in Mongolia no one would know. “If we died in China or if I was repatriated into North Korea I thought maybe someone would take care of my son.”

Another three long years went by in China before Ji-hyun, Kwang Joo and Chol made it to the UK.

It was 2008 and they were granted British citizenship in a swift but agonising four months.

Ji-hyun said: “I just cried and cried, in China I had no ID card, I lost my family so I just cried and said thank you very much, thank you very much.”

Nowadays when she looks back at her life and sees what Kim Jong-un is doing she is angry and dumbfounded.

She said: “I can’t say any words, sometimes reading the news I think, this is my country, my home town. Wow.”

Ji-hyun described to the SNJ how the first time she felt happiness was in 2010 two years after her family arrived in England.

She said: “I was sitting round the table with my family and my children were smiling and talking about how school was going.”

Previously her understanding of what happiness felt like was centred on making “the leader” happy as he had the status of a deity.

It was four years after they came to the UK in 2012 when Chol asked his mother why she had deserted him to go back to North Korea.

When Ji-hyun had been repatriated the authorities had told her son that she had abandoned him.

Her son’s question was a defining one for Ji-hyun. She said: “It is not only my son’s question; it’s all the other North Korean children who are now separated with their parents.

“So I started this work for all the other North Korean mothers out there.”

Since then she has been working as an outreach and project officer for the European Alliance for Human Rights in North Korea.

On Thursday, May 7 calling it “a day I will remember for the rest of my life” Ji-hyun voted in the UK general elections.

Ji-hyun now lives in Manchester with her three children and husband. Chol is 16-years-old and is taking his GCSEs.