Many burst into tears at the reunions, which involve 100 people from each side. Elderly men in suits and women in traditional Korean silk hanbok dresses sat at numbered tables in a large restaurant. Some sat, spoke and exchanged photographs; others simply looked bewildered as they clutched hands and stared into faces unseen for six decades. The relatives have been separated from since the 1950-53 Korean War.  "After a while, my father said they need to stop crying and smile, so the memories of the meeting could be better. He said they should say goodbye smiling, not crying. It was hard to see that," Kim Jong-hwa said. Kim's father wasn't immediately available for comment.  "We were very happy to meet her and learn about how she had lived," Kim Jong-hwa said of his aunt. "I felt relieved to hear she had worked as a nurse and later became a doctor, that probably means she had a better life" than many North Koreans.  "Still, it broke my hear to see her and think of the difficulties she might have gone through," Kim said. "She told us that when the North and South Korean family meetings started, she was upset that no one in her family had looked for her," he said.  "It was a shock for us to hear she felt that way," Kim said. "We did our best to explain to her we thought she had died during the war and that we would have tried to look for her, had we known she was still out there. When she left, she said she understood, but I wondered what she really thought and how she really felt."  The elder Kim had not seen his sister since 1951, when she was 15 years old.  He was a police officer during the war and often was away from home. When he returned one day, "She was gone. I asked where she was and she had been kidnapped [by North Korean soldiers]. After that, we didn't know where she was," Kim said.
Kim Byung-ki has just seen his sister for the first time in 59 years, a sibling he thought was dead until last year. They reunited over the weekend for the first time since the Korean War tore apart