South Korea "Erased" 4,000 People To Host The Olympic Games: True Story Behind “Squid Game”

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Speaker 1 It is one of the biggest churches in the city of Pusan in South Korea. Only nobody really knows it exists.
It's in the middle of the woods.

Speaker 1 You have to be invited in to join the church, but it's also not a cult. This is not a cult story.
The church has the capacity to seat 3,500 people, give or take. Sometimes it's 4,000.

Speaker 1 There are just what feels like an endless row upon row upon row of rock hard church pews. Every church member is forced to sit on for hours every single Sunday.

Speaker 1 The pews, the chairs, they're at a firm 90 degree angle. And because attendance is so high, you're arm to arm.

Speaker 1 In the summer, it feels like you and the person next to you are going to fuse together in the flesh because the sweat, the moistness, just touching each other for hours at a time.

Speaker 1 Winter is not as bad. But every single Sunday, the inevitable moment comes, like every Sunday, the red sack people, the pastor, Pastor Lim at the podium will ask the red sack members to come up.

Speaker 1 It looks like a row of red floating balls that just float onto the stage. But they're people.
They're wearing red burlap sacks with ugly paint on the front.

Speaker 1 And the ugly paint reads, I am a sinner who has gone against God's word. Everyone in the church holds their breath as the pastor approaches the red sack people.
His eyes look soft.

Speaker 1 They look sympathetic. He puts his hands on their heads and they bow down.
The pastor closes his eyes. In the name of Jesus, you are being punished.
Then he moves to the next one.

Speaker 1 In the name of Jesus, you are being punished. And then the next, one by one, he does this to all of them.
In the name of Jesus, you are being punished. In the name of Jesus, you are being punished.

Speaker 1 And then he turns around. The pastor does.
And when he turns back to face the row of red sack wearing people, he has put on a pair of boxing gloves.

Speaker 1 And bam, he just starts pommeling them one by one to the ground none of the thousands of people in this church look away they're not allowed to their eyes are glued to the front none of them stop the pastor none of them scream none of them shout none of them do anything until these red sacks at the front are laying down horizontal on the ground and now they're oozing red liquid they're dead The church members think, well, they're lucky if they're dead, actually.

Speaker 1 Punch them to death? A lot of them get beaten to death. The church members think, well, they're lucky if they're dead.
you know? If they're dead, their bodies will be dragged off, probably to be sold.

Speaker 1 If not, they're going to repeat this again next week. This is not a cult.
This is the Brothers Home, a government-funded camp to cleanse the humans of South Korea for the Olympics.

Speaker 1 But instead, the welfare center known as Brothers Home basically is its own torture facility with sick, twisted games played with these prisoners.

Speaker 1 This is the inspiration behind the Netflix series, Squid Games.

Speaker 1 We would like to thank today's sponsors who have made it possible for Rotten Mango to directly support a survivor of today's episode.

Speaker 1 This episode's partnerships have also made it possible to support Rotten Mango's growing team, and we'd also like to thank you guys for your continued support as we work on our mission to be worthy advocates.

Speaker 1 As always, full show notes are available by RottenMangoPodcast.com. With that being said, today's case involves mentions of internment, essay, trafficking, and torture.

Speaker 1 Please take a break if it gets to be too much. This case is on the heavier side.
But I also think it's very important.

Speaker 1 Another thing to note is that this is something that happens all across the world, like I said in the previous episode. And and South Korea at the time that this took place was not a democracy.

Speaker 1 It was run by a dictator. So hopefully massive changes have been made.

Speaker 1 And additionally, our amazing Korean researchers and translators were actually able to travel to some of the survivors involved in today's case, conduct in-person interviews.

Speaker 1 They translated the survivor's book, The Surviving Child, written by Han Jong-sun. He's a huge part of the case.
I'm going to refer to him as Han. Additionally, this is a three-part case.

Speaker 1 If you haven't watched part one, please go watch that first. I'm going to link link it because none of this is going to make sense.

Speaker 1 In part one, we go through the torture games that were held at the Brothers Home Welfare Center, how they compare to Squid Games, and in this episode, we're going to go through what they do to the dead bodies, as well as the salt, water, food torture, and what happens when you escape.

Speaker 1 In part three, we will go in depth on the wealthy benefactors of this facility. So, with that being said, let's get started.

Speaker 1 In season two of Netflix's Squid Games, the main character, Kihun, he just survived Squid Games.

Speaker 1 In season one, he walks away with 40 something million dollars, but he more or less, I mean, was it worth it? I don't really know.

Speaker 1 He more or less had to kill his childhood friend that dies in the games to win. And the minute he comes home, he finds out that his mom is dead as well.

Speaker 1 So for a year, Kihun, he can't even touch the money that he won.

Speaker 1 The idea that he would have to use this blood money, it just reminds him of every single person, all 400-something people that died in the Squid Games. It doesn't even make sense.

Speaker 1 Couldn't he win all of this money without them dying? It's not like they died so that he could get the money. The money was already there.
It doesn't logically, it doesn't connect.

Speaker 1 A year after his initial win, he finds out the truth. The games are created for rich people's entertainment and this lights a fire underneath him.

Speaker 1 The logical thing for him to do is find closure, walk away. But instead, Kihun vows he is going to get revenge on the rich VIPs and he's not going to stop.

Speaker 1 He is going to end these stupid games, even if it means losing every single penny that he had just won and even losing his own life.

Speaker 1 The National Assembly building in South Korea is this massive stone structure. But the legislators, they show up.
So do the administrative staff, personnel, researchers.

Speaker 1 They show up to work and outside is usually a row of people, protesters.

Speaker 1 But this time it's different because a lot of people will protest different things at the National Assembly, but this group, they've been very serious.

Speaker 1 They've been here, living here for three years, living outside the National Assembly intense. Sometimes they walk, sometimes they just hold a sign with tears streaming down their face.

Speaker 1 Sometimes they fast and people have to beg them to eat because they're becoming emaciated. This time, they're sitting next to each other one by one and they're all looking stoic.

Speaker 1 They're not saying anything. Their eyes look like they're about to start crying.
Some of them are already crying. There's just tears dropping everywhere.

Speaker 1 And they're all shaving their heads to get attention. How many people in that group? It's like a row of 10 almost.

Speaker 1 These are the victims of the brothers home. They have been protesting for three something plus years.
I mean, it's a long time. And it all started with one man, the man who wrote the book, Han.

Speaker 1 He tells the legislators, I am a child who survived hell. You know, it's easy to go from human to beast.
but very hard to return from beast to human.

Speaker 1 Which is why after he escaped brothers home, he wanted to kill people. He admits he thought becoming a serial killer was the only way that he could escape brother's home.

Speaker 1 He says, like a psychopath, after I left, I just wanted to kill everyone around me. I felt like it was the only way to get everyone to listen to my story.

Speaker 1 But then I thought, what about everybody else? Everybody already hates us. We were labeled as vagrants.
People saw us as less than human even after we got out of brothers home.

Speaker 1 Why give them more reason to look down on us? So he said, I'll give it one shot. I will go to the National Assembly and I will protest and see what happens.

Speaker 1 Escaping the Brothers Home compound is nearly impossible. In part one, we talked about how the walls are 30 feet tall.

Speaker 1 I mean, even if you somehow manage to Spider-Man climb the structure, they put in certain parts of the wall glass shards on top. One attempted escapee, Lee, he says he made it up the wall.

Speaker 1 He climbed it. And when he reached the top, he had cut up his hands and legs so badly he was caught.
He says, I was dripping in blood. I couldn't walk.

Speaker 1 So I was dragged across the concrete, leaving these bloodstains, sent back to the office. I was beaten by the guards.
Everybody took turns hitting me. I was beat probably 100 times in that moment.

Speaker 1 Then he was taken to the church to repent for his sins. He had to put on that red sack.
And from there, the pastor would pummel him in front of everyone to show everybody.

Speaker 1 This is exactly what happens when you try to escape from brother's home. The pastor, is that the same guy as that head dude in charge or it's a no, different guy.
But he's another top

Speaker 1 person.

Speaker 1 They're a family. Whoa.

Speaker 1 In the end of part one, 12-year-old Zheng, do you remember him? His dad is the toilet paper salesman.

Speaker 1 He's trapped in brother's home for two years and the only thing keeping him alive is the thought that his dad is going to come and save him. Years later, his...

Speaker 1 dad shows up at brother's home, but instead of being there to take him out, rescue him, Zheng's dad is standing there wearing a blue tracksuit.

Speaker 1 It's very interesting because Squid Game, even the actual show, has a lot of interesting components, like the fact that there's so many familial dynamics at play in season two.

Speaker 1 I would say these are not really spoilers because season two is connected to season three. So we don't really know what happens even.
But if you're adverse to any type of spoiler, please be warned.

Speaker 1 So for example, in the new round of squid games, there's a mother and son duo.

Speaker 1 The two of them, they meet in the games. Neither knew that the other party was going to show up.
They have no idea.

Speaker 1 They get there, they enter the games, and both of them are there to win the money so that they could pay off the son's gambling debt.

Speaker 1 Without giving any spoilers, I mean, how is that going to play out? We don't know, because like I said, season three is coming. But if it's just like the first games, there's only one standing.

Speaker 1 It can't be both the mother and the son. If there's an unspoken familial bond that would indicate...
Then it has to be the son, right? Because he's younger.

Speaker 1 And mothers likely have that innate desire to protect their own children. Or I wonder if it's a question of, are humans just humans at the end of the day?

Speaker 1 Like when it really comes down to it, survival instincts kick in regardless of who birthed you and it's about surviving in the end.

Speaker 1 For example, the recruiter, remember the guy in the suit that works for the games? His whole job is to go around, approach people at subway stations. He knows they have debt.

Speaker 1 He's the one that scouts the potential candidates for the game, invites them in. He thinks all these recruits are beneath humans.
He thinks they're subhumans.

Speaker 1 He believes genuinely that that he is doing the world a favor by getting rid of them.

Speaker 1 He used to be a pink suit wearing guard inside of Squid Games, and he tells the main character in season two, clearing and incinerating the bodies of countless people like you, these things aren't human.

Speaker 1 They're just trash. They have no purpose in this world.
That's what I kept telling myself for years. And I worked hard, and one day, the game makers, they gave me a gun.
I like the way it felt.

Speaker 1 It was like somebody had finally acknowledged my existence. One year there was a man who lost, and I went over to shoot him, but I

Speaker 1 recognized his face. Can you guess who it was?

Speaker 1 His friend? My dad.

Speaker 1 And he still shot him. He killed his own dad.
Why? That's what happens in the games.

Speaker 1 Killer be killed. And also, I guess maybe he thinks these humans are so subhuman and he has resentment towards his dad.

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Speaker 1 12-year-old Zhang in brothers home is standing in the middle of the field and he's staring at his dad wearing that blue tracksuit. Zhang's dad actually looks worse than Zheng.

Speaker 1 He's lost so much weight. It's like someone just draped a blue tracksuit on top of a thin wire hanger.
He can't even fit the smallest size. Jung says he looked terrible, just skin and bones.

Speaker 1 It's a complicated feeling.

Speaker 1 Are you happy to see the person that you have been praying to see for years or do you feel sad and miserable and depressed that they're going to share the same fate as you and that nobody can save either of you?

Speaker 1 Jung says it's even more complicated because you have this weird shame component.

Speaker 1 He says, I felt I didn't even want to meet my dad's eyes in there because I thought, wouldn't my father be ashamed to see me right now? It just was such a strange feeling.

Speaker 1 A few days pass since Jung first sees his dad. Anytime all the prisoners are gathered in the courtyard, he keeps his head down so his dad doesn't doesn't see him.

Speaker 1 And then one day he hears a familiar voice. Zheng, are you eating well?

Speaker 1 It's his dad. His dad is looking around nervously and he's just glancing from side to side.
And finally, he reaches into his pocket and pushes a package into Zheng's hands.

Speaker 1 It's a rice cake. It's a hard-ended rice cake.
During the holidays, each prisoner receives one rice cake. It's just a small square of rice cake.

Speaker 1 He had been carrying the rice cake for days, not knowing when he would run into his son. He starved so that his son could get an extra bite.

Speaker 1 Zheng breaks down when he's telling interviewers about this moment later on because he said, I was 14 at the time. I was so hungry.
I ate the rice cake. I ate it all as soon as I got it.

Speaker 1 But afterwards, I just thought, I'm so immature.

Speaker 1 I mean, thinking about it now, how my father must have felt when he saw me, when he met me from his perspective, what he did to give me that rice cake, seeing, me there.

Speaker 1 I mean, I think I was just too immature.

Speaker 1 Turns out, after Zheng disappeared, Zheng's dad spent a year searching for him, going everywhere, going to all the train stations, trying to figure out where the hell is my 12-year-old son?

Speaker 1 He would never run away like the police are claiming. So something's not right here.
Also, the police, they're not telling him that his son has been taken into the brother's home.

Speaker 1 They're just saying, oh, I don't know. Maybe he ran away.
Who cares about your son? I mean, police are the ones that took him in. Yeah, yes.
They're the ones that kidnapped. They don't even tell him.

Speaker 1 Because they get bonus points from the government. This is just going to cause more trouble.
So they don't like it. They don't want to tell him.

Speaker 1 So somebody, they kidnapped the kids and then the parents come in saying, oh, my kid is missing. And they're saying, oh, okay.
We don't know what happened. Meanwhile, they're the one that took the.

Speaker 1 Yes. Wow.

Speaker 1 Jung's dad spends a year searching for him. No help, no hope from the police or neighbors.
So he resorts to trying to drown out his sorrows and alcohol. One day, Zheng Sr.

Speaker 1 gets so upset that he's drinking. I mean, sure, he's not the mayor of Puzan, but he's thinking my son was a straight A student.
He meant something to the world. He could have been someone.

Speaker 1 He meant something to me. Isn't that all that matters? But the police, who are they? You know, they're here to serve the people and they're treating him like dog poops stuck on their shoe.

Speaker 1 He walks over to the police station, not to start a fight or to be violent, just to protest, a one-man protest. Just help me find my son.
Where is my son? You must help me.

Speaker 1 The police take one look at him. And they smell the alcohol on his breath.
And they think, what a vagrant. Take him in.
Wow.

Speaker 1 He walked into a police station. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Wow, that. Wow.

Speaker 1 Jung was in there since he was 12 till he was nearly 15. He says, I strongly resisted the essays at the time that were happening every single night to others.

Speaker 1 But because of that, I was beaten even more. It's a different humiliation that's different from just being beat.
Even now, the shock is too much. I just knew I had to escape that hell.

Speaker 1 He's out in the courtyard one day and his eyes are glazed over, just trying not to get burnt by the sun, which is really hard.

Speaker 1 Okay, so they're saying in the summers, even in the winters, it's really difficult because if you listen to part one, they're only allowed to wash their face with coarse salt grains.

Speaker 1 It rips your flesh. It makes it raw in the sun.
And then you're getting punched in the face by these guards every day. And now you have no moisturizer, nothing.
You're just in the glare of the sun.

Speaker 1 He's squinting and he looks up and his heart starts pounding. He notices all the guards are busy.

Speaker 1 And there's been this one building he's always looked at because if you were to get to the roof of that building, it's tall enough that you could potentially jump onto the ledge of the wall that's blocking them.

Speaker 1 Like the 30 feet wall? Yes. If you climb to the top of that building, the gap between the wall and that building are not that much.

Speaker 1 And it's about the same height, the roof and the upper ledge of the wall.

Speaker 1 So he takes the chance. He says, I ran like lightning to the building's roof.

Speaker 1 He jumps from the roof, knowing that he could very well land on the floor and die, or worse, survive only to be beaten to death, okay?

Speaker 1 But he jumps, lands on the ledge of the wall, scrapes himself from all the blood. He drops down from the wall on the other side.
It's not nearly as high because... it's built on a hill.

Speaker 1 He jumps down and just starts booking it. There's no looking back.
He's sprinting through the woods, scraping his face.

Speaker 1 He can't even keep his eyes fully open because the branches are slamming into him and he doesn't want to slow down. He's just running.

Speaker 1 The next thing he knows, there's this massive barbed wire fence in front of him. What the hell is this? Some sort of secondary blockade? He doesn't even know how long he's been running.

Speaker 1 He just starts without even thinking, climbing up the barbed wired fence, breaking the skin all over his hands, face, body. It's like going through a paper shredder.

Speaker 1 But he said he didn't even feel pain in the moment. The only thought being, I have to escape this hell no matter what.
There is no other way. I have to escape this hell.

Speaker 1 He drops down on the other side. He made it.
This is freedom. He made it past the walls.
And then click. It's the sound of a gun right behind him.
Put your hands up and don't move.

Speaker 1 He raises his bloody hands in the air and turns around. It's a uniformed man holding a gun up to him.
He's not wearing a blue tracksuit. He's wearing a military outfit.
A soldier.

Speaker 1 Jung had been so desperate. Honestly, nobody knows how long he ran for.
He doesn't even remember. But he ran for so long, he ran directly into a military base.

Speaker 1 Sneaking into a military military base to him still can't be worse than being stuck at brother's home, right? I mean, that's what he thinks.

Speaker 1 He begs them to save him because all the other people that make it past the walls, if you're wearing the blue tracksuit, you're just brought immediately back in.

Speaker 1 You're seen almost like an escaped prisoner.

Speaker 1 And he begs the soldiers to save him or better yet, don't save me. Don't do anything.
Just let me go. I won't tell anyone.

Speaker 1 The soldiers load him up to a car and he's just begging, please, sir, help me, please, sir, help me. The door to the soldier's car opens.

Speaker 1 They throw him out and then they throw something into his hands. It's a big loaf of bread.
He's just standing on the road on the street. He's not back at Brother's home.
He's free.

Speaker 1 With that, the car just drives off.

Speaker 1 Wow. So they kind of saved him? Yeah, they did.
They could have sent him back. I don't think that they knew.

Speaker 1 anything of the true torture of what was going on at brother's home, but they had a lot more mercy than the guards at brother's home, clearly.

Speaker 1 They just thought if this guy doesn't want to go back that much, that he's begging and crying and willing to climb over a barbed wire defense, maybe he doesn't want to go back.

Speaker 1 It's an even more complicated feeling though, because at first, Jung said it feels very surreal. He escaped, he's free, but then he starts panicking.

Speaker 1 His dad is still there, but he also starts panicking more because he realizes, what is he going to do? Call the cops and tell them that his dad is in brother's home?

Speaker 1 It's not like he can tell the police. The police are the one that took them in.

Speaker 1 there is nobody that he can trust he was only ever taught ever since he was a little kid hey when you're in danger report it to the police station and ask the police for help now what jung decides if he's going to get his dad out he still has to try and survive until then he finds ironically a newspaper distribution center he starts working there sleeping there eating there and then one day the cops barge in and they take him in they arrest him why

Speaker 1 One of the neighbors reported a vagrant was living at the distribution center.

Speaker 1 What? They arrested him for being a vagrant.

Speaker 1 And just like in season two of Squid Games, just like Ki-hoon, the main character, when Jung opens his eyes, he's back in a blue tracksuit in a bunk bed at the brother's home. You are kidding me.

Speaker 1 Yeah. How long was he out? A few months.
But he's a lot more bloodier now from all the beatings from running away. He said in that moment he realized, I'm never going to get out of here.

Speaker 1 I'm never going to get out of here, at least alive. Another survivor says, as you keep getting beaten up, you know, you just, you just give up.

Speaker 1 The end of all this waiting, you think you're waiting to escape. The end of all of it is just death.
There's nothing to wait for except the day that you die. Nobody's coming to save you.

Speaker 1 Wait, so this was, okay, they started this whole initiative for the Olympic, right?

Speaker 1 It was prior to the Olympics, but they amped amped it up and the government started pouring more money into these welfare centers prior to the Olympics. But the initiative started years before.

Speaker 1 Years before. Yes.
So meanwhile, when this happened, like he's now it's what, like three years into this? Yes. Has the Olympic started yet or after?

Speaker 1 Oh, it's after. I mean, even after, they're still taking people.
Oh, so now it's like they don't need to like put on anything for the for the tourism.

Speaker 1 They're still taking people on the from the streets.

Speaker 1 Wow, okay

Speaker 1 han and his older sister the one who wrote the book han they're dragged to the police station by their dad their dad's always been very irresponsible when he's drunk but it never was it never was like this bad there were beatings here and there but this felt very different he drags them to the police station stay here dad will be back

Speaker 1 In theory, this is the best place for their dad to leave them. In reality, this is the worst place for their dad to leave them.
Because remember, the police are the ones taking them in. Han is nine.

Speaker 1 He says, I mean, my dad told us to wait at the police station for him. He promised he would come back and get us.
The police don't care. Why did he dad left him there?

Speaker 1 It's unclear if he was trying to abandon his kids because it was too much responsibility or whether he was in some sort of trouble and he wouldn't be home for a few days.

Speaker 1 And it'd be better to leave his kids at a... police station than to leave them alone.
So the father doesn't know.

Speaker 1 He has no clue that brother's home is a torturous place or that they're even going to get sent to brother's home. He thinks they're going to be there when he gets back.
Okay.

Speaker 1 Wow. Yeah.
The Korean police stations are a little bit different. So in Korea, there's even things like police boxes.
It's like a little box where

Speaker 1 police officers are stationed in neighborhoods and they're part of the community. You don't really see them as like a cop.
Yeah, like a security.

Speaker 1 Yes, yes. So it's a little more communal.
And he thought, okay, they'll be here when I get back if I do decide to come back for them. The police don't care.

Speaker 1 They throw the two, Han and his sister, into the back of the refrigerated windowless van. They drive them to brothers home.
Wait, so Han has a sister, older or younger? Older sister. She's 12.

Speaker 1 He's nine. Okay.
And in the van, Han says, you know, I started crying. I was asking to be let out and to be able to go home.
For a moment, I remember the sky turning completely white.

Speaker 1 I heard a noise like cicadas were embedded, stuck inside my ears. ears and then the stars were going around my eyes.
And then once that gradually faded, I realized that man just slapped me so hard.

Speaker 1 I almost lost consciousness. I looked around the van.
Only then did I realize there were about five other kids our age in the car besides the strange men. And that's how I ended up at Brother's Home.

Speaker 1 Han, just like the others, he has to go through all the survival games, which consist of very creative ways to just torture everyone in blue tracksuits. The guards just torture thousands of people.

Speaker 1 And like I said, some of them are as young as four. Some of them are elderly people.
The torture is non-discriminatory. Everybody's getting tortured.

Speaker 1 And the torture doesn't even end with the twisted activities.

Speaker 1 This whole place is almost manufactured to make every aspect of the day feel like walking on glass shards that have been heated to be 100 degrees. There are two time slots for food for the day.

Speaker 1 Designated time slots. There is exactly 30 minutes to eat, which sounds like more than enough time until you realize there's 3,500 people who have 30 minutes to eat.

Speaker 1 Everyone only has about three and a half minutes to grab their food, sit down, inhale it before getting up for the next people to sit down. You always hear first X number of people, go, go, go.

Speaker 1 People are getting smacked and beaten up if they're not eating fast enough.

Speaker 1 The first few meal times are said to be the hardest because it's hard to even swallow the food that they're giving you, let alone do it in three and a half minutes just shoveling it in.

Speaker 1 You would spend at least the greater chunk of that time just gagging. The food is almost always the same.
It's rotten rice.

Speaker 1 So the rice, they leave it in these damp containers and they become moldy and there's those rice bugs everywhere. They don't rinse the rice.
They don't get rid of the bugs.

Speaker 1 They just steam it just like that. Fermented fish, but the fish is always rotten.
And it's fermented without seasonings. There's fermented cabbage, but there's no red pepper flakes to make the kimchi.

Speaker 1 So it's just just salt-sprinkled kimchi, diced radish kimchi.

Speaker 1 There would be some soup on some days, but it would just be water with nasty oil floating around and then little radishes just floating around. It is not only a nutritionless meal.

Speaker 1 Every single ingredient is moldy, spoiled, and to the point that it was almost decaying.

Speaker 1 And they just slop it all together in water, cook it into a fermented rotten stew, and serve it with rotten, molded, unwashed rice stinged to food poisoning perfection.

Speaker 1 Even if you can stand the taste and digestion of the decaying food, there's still not enough food given to you to fill your stomach. Everyone in there is starving at all times of the day.

Speaker 1 Everybody is malnourished. And that's when you find out things that you never really think you would ever find out.

Speaker 1 Han says he has a lot of knowledge that most people probably don't have. For example, if you eat too many pine cones or pine needles, you get diarrhea and you're going to vomit for days.

Speaker 1 He says, but you can pick the pine cones, peel off the outer layer with your teeth, and then chew on the white part inside, kind of like an artichoke.

Speaker 1 You can't really swallow it, but you can at least feel like you're eating something.

Speaker 1 Or if you have the chance, you can catch and eat centipedes. It will feel like the most nutrient-dense meal at the brother's home.
It's hard to say which part of that is worse.

Speaker 1 Is it the torture games? Is it the food? Or is it that non-stop itch that you feel on every part of your body that makes you want to scrape your skin off, but you can't?

Speaker 1 Because the minute that your skin breaks, there's just pus oozing out. Almost every single person in Brothers Home has a severe skin disease.

Speaker 1 Most of them have severe eczema and their skin is just raw. It's throbbing.
It's like, it feels like there's a heartbeat under every part of their skin.

Speaker 1 Every single day, without fail, regardless, it feels like their skin is about to slop off. They're forced to scrub themselves on this sensitive skin with coarse salt.

Speaker 1 During the winter, the ice-cold water combined with the salt is so unbearable, everyone avoids washing at all. Han writes in his book, many of us had skin diseases because we also shared blankets.

Speaker 1 And, you know, hygiene was poor. Everybody's skin was always leaking pus and blood.
And it's now being rubbed all over everybody else under the blankets in the shared bunks.

Speaker 1 And at night, when you think, okay, maybe I'm getting used to the itch of this eczema itch and having these dry, open, raw wounds scrape with salt, just when you think you're used to it, at night, there's the,

Speaker 1 you hear a lot of smacking sounds in brothers home at night. They're light smacking sounds because you can't be too loud.
A slap helps more than a scratch.

Speaker 1 Maybe it's in your head because you think the lice are dying from each smack. It's the intense, inescapable itch of pubic lice.

Speaker 1 Even if you think the itch is bearable, it's the type of crawling sensation down there that makes you feel like there are a thousand little bugs crawling over you.

Speaker 1 It feels like they're trying to crawl inside of you. Lice.

Speaker 1 The only chance of getting rid of the lice is once a week, you get a hot water bath for two seconds and it's only, it's the only time to try and get rid of all the foreign friends.

Speaker 1 It also doesn't help that you only have two pairs of clothes, the two blue track suits, which by the way, they're so crazy about everyone being uniform.

Speaker 1 A lot of people say it felt like North Korea in there because... It doesn't even make sense why the uniformity was so important.

Speaker 1 Even if the zipper is broken and can't be zipped up, if the uniform requires it to be zipped up, you have to find a way to get it to stay closed. Otherwise you will be beaten to death.

Speaker 1 600 people died in here, at least. Han says, it doesn't matter.
If your pants are, the waistband stretches out, you have to find a way to tie it with no supplies.

Speaker 1 Because yeah, your pants falling down, sure, in front of 4,000 people. It's a little embarrassing, but you're going to get beaten.
Everyone's fingernails look like they've been gnawed off by rats.

Speaker 1 They're always trimmed incredibly short. There are only five nail clippers for the whole place.
But if you have long nails, you get beat. So everybody just chews off their nails.

Speaker 1 But there's no money in the torture itself because that's what doesn't make sense. Who is funding the brother's home? Why does it exist?

Speaker 1 So if the government funds Brother's home and every quote unquote vagrant that gets brought in, there's government subsidies. The people who run brother's home, they get paid per person.

Speaker 1 They get paid per person per day.

Speaker 1 But that's not where the real money is. The real money is in.

Speaker 1 Okay, so a few years ago, there was a story that a good chunk of the prison population in China don't have fingernails. You're talking about today?

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 You know, it's like a whole thing. Everyone's like, where are their fingernails going? Are they chewing them off? Are they being ripped off? Like, why don't they have fingernails?

Speaker 1 Are there certain conditions inside the prisons where their fingernails just fall off? What's going on? They do some investigating.

Speaker 1 And a lot of the American consumption of pre-peeled garlic is peeled in Chinese prisons. So a lot of these people, they would say, you try to, because you have to meet a quota every single month.

Speaker 1 You have to peel enough garlic slices. And garlic has certain compounds where if you keep peeling them, your fingernails pop off.
Whoa, okay.

Speaker 1 And it's not just China, but incarcerated workers produce over $2 billion worth of goods annually. Even in the U.S., about two-thirds of the prison population work.

Speaker 1 And a lot of them, for some weird reason, are in the the food industry the prison complex and the agricultural business are like hand in hand so they're working you're saying yes and they're getting paid like 20 cents a day are you talking you're talking about brothers home or yes everywhere so in US prisons they're working in prisons across the world they're working and then in brothers home brothers home is this crazy trickle of money the facility gets paid by the government just for housing the vagrants but brothers home is like why don't we make more money Because what are they doing all day, these people that we have laying around?

Speaker 1 Let's have them work. Toys, children's toys, stationery, baby shoes, toothpicks.
That's what they're making. Never-ending cycle.

Speaker 1 One survivor says, if the overall production target wasn't met, they would stop all the work.

Speaker 1 They would send the workers out into the field and they would beat us one by one mercilessly with these giant pliers and hammers on the inner thighs. Your inner thighs would be all bruised.

Speaker 1 and my only thought at work was, I must not get hit. The worst part was a lot of the kids worked in fishing hook factories.
They have to make fishing hooks.

Speaker 1 So these factories, oh, is that what those 60 buildings are? Just different factories? Different factories and different warehouses to house these people.

Speaker 1 They have a church on the premises. They have a medical unit, which just consists of, they rip you open and pour salt into your wound and rub it around.
Oh my God. They have a psych ward.

Speaker 1 So this is, the government wants to get paid for these people, but you can't beat them into submission. A lot of them have really lost their minds in there.

Speaker 1 So they just throw them into the psych ward where they drug them non-stop and they just get essayed and abused while they're not in their right minds.

Speaker 1 Do you know if this facility is still around today or Dave? No, it has been replaced by apartment buildings.

Speaker 1 Yes, because back then Pusan was not as, um, it wasn't that big of a city. I mean, it was, but it wasn't what it it is now.

Speaker 1 Wow. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So the worst for the children though is this one factory where you make fishing hooks. They say when you work that quickly making fishing hooks the hook gets stuck under your fingernails.

Speaker 1 And the purpose of a fishing hook is not release whatever it's latched onto. So when you work quickly the hooks get stuck and when you pull it out your nail gets pulled out as well.

Speaker 1 You have to tear the flesh to get them out. They say you rip off your own fingernails to get the hooks out because you can't work and produce when you have fishing hooks stuck on each of your nails.

Speaker 1 There's not even time to think about what you're doing. It's just constant thoughts of, if I don't do this, the beating is going to be worse than this.
They keep working faster and faster.

Speaker 1 One survivor says, the day starts at five. We make our beds.
We have to do that in five seconds, very quickly like the military.

Speaker 1 If not, you're going to get beaten by the guard the first thing in the morning. Then they do roll call, then you go outside, then you do the washroom with just salt.

Speaker 1 Three seconds of water, salt for face wash, salt as toothpaste. Then you have to sing the military anthem.
And one of the survivors says, I don't understand the point in that.

Speaker 1 If we were not in sync, we were beat.

Speaker 1 It just didn't make any sense what the point was. It's not even a real military.
Then they would be sent off to the factories.

Speaker 1 A survivor states, they force people to work in factories to produce products, and then those products would be sold to the public.

Speaker 1 The facility pocketed money from the products, as well as benefiting benefiting from the free labor, as well as getting paid government subsidies.

Speaker 1 Another survivor states, after all of that, 14 and 15 year olds were forced to carry sacks that weighed 60 pounds back and forth for construction to happen. All those buildings

Speaker 1 were built by them.

Speaker 1 It was a nightmare. It was crazy.
The children were unable to keep up. They would get beat.
So the kids avoid getting beat. They're forced to work harder.

Speaker 1 The survival instinct would kick in and it was astonishingly painful. They were forced to build the wall even that held them prisoner, the giant 30-foot wall that made it nearly impossible to escape.

Speaker 1 They were forced to build it. They say to build this wall, you have to carry up stones.
One of the adults in front of me became exhausted and sat down for a moment to rest.

Speaker 1 The guard on site smashed the man's head with a wooden bat and he died on the spot. Yeah.
That was the first death that this survivor witnessed.

Speaker 1 It wouldn't be the last, but because it was the first, he he said he was so consumed with fear, he couldn't eat or sleep for the next few days.

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Speaker 1 And in Squid Games, there's this subplot. I'm sure you guys have all watched season one, and even if you haven't watched season two, the subplot is continuing.

Speaker 1 We don't really know how it's going to resolve yet so I don't know if this is a spoiler but there is a subplot of the guards, the pink uniform wearing guards in squid games.

Speaker 1 They will take the bodies that they've shot down, the losers of the game, if you will, and they're supposed to shoot them dead. But instead of killing them, they immobilize them.

Speaker 1 Then they take them into this little bunker where a doctor shows up to try and sell the organs, take out the organs. It's very fascinating, the levels of profit.

Speaker 1 So the VIP clients, they get their entertainment out of these people dying, out of watching them kill each other for survival and for money. That's their entertainment.

Speaker 1 To the guards that are one step above the contestants, they take advantage of the contestants by in death selling their organs and profiting.

Speaker 1 The same goes for Brothers Home. Right, that's because that's my question.
Why are they so fucking evil? Like,

Speaker 1 you don't. Yeah, okay.

Speaker 1 The facility will continue to profit even if the victims die.

Speaker 1 One survivor whose sole job was to clean up messes, particularly the messes of people who were escaped, recaptured, and beaten, he says, my job was to clean up after them. But how?

Speaker 1 How do I clean it up? Wiping away the bloodstains, cleaning up the aftermath? I mean, I saw people all laying there on the floor with their eyes wide open. They were dead.

Speaker 1 The total number of people that died is said to be around 551, but it's likely that the numbers are far higher than that. One survivor says, there are so many graves there.

Speaker 1 If you look behind the church where the weeds grow thick, some days you would see mounds being made, just so many. There's like a bathhouse there.
Right in front of it is this incinerator.

Speaker 1 A lot of bones would come out of that incinerator. I remember a man named Kim.
He was quite old at the time. This is a direct quote.
He was carried into a secret guidance room.

Speaker 1 That's what they called it. That's where they would beat us into guidance, to listening to the guards better, not trying to escape.
He was forced into that room and carried out. I watched.

Speaker 1 He was dead.

Speaker 1 He died from beating, but I was told everyone would just report it as some sort of natural illness as his cause of death and that sometimes if the beating scars aren't that bad, they would sell them for medical studies.

Speaker 1 They would body farm. They would sell the bodies.
Just like squeaking. Yes.

Speaker 1 One survivor states, yeah, I mean, if the bodies weren't needed, the guards would carry it up to the church at dawn and to the mass graves.

Speaker 1 One victim states, people were starved, beaten, and killed, and their deaths were never reported. They just buried them or sold them.
All the kids are freezing. That's like a huge thing.

Speaker 1 All the survivors mention over and over again, you don't understand the winters in this place.

Speaker 1 You don't understand how cold it gets when there's snow falling everywhere and you're shivering to the bone. Your lips are constantly bleeding because you're so dry.
It is miserable.

Speaker 1 Some people had frostbitten toes that had to be amputated. And then what do they do after they amputated? They just rub salt on it.
They said it's that bad.

Speaker 1 Underneath the facility, there's this little warehouse, storage room, and it's filled to the brim with clothes. Like uniforms? Or

Speaker 1 better clothes. They're making.
No.

Speaker 1 Okay, so remember how I said this is not a cult story. So why do they have this giant church? Is it just because one of the leaders, like one of the facility owners is religious?

Speaker 1 No, because religion is used to reel in donations for Brothers Home. From the outside, Brothers Home is a very legitimate welfare center.

Speaker 1 They're actually the biggest welfare center that is funded by the government. And now they're going to ask for donations from people around the world.
The director of Brothers Home was smart.

Speaker 1 He did not care for Jesus, not even one bit. He's not a religious man.
But survivor said, they used religion to add more money to their business.

Speaker 1 If there's no religion involved in their center, who would donate money? It's a government-funded facility. But you tell people, I'm Christian.
I'm a Christian doing good things.

Speaker 1 I need donation money. Donation money from foreigners would flood in.
They would donate just

Speaker 1 cases of clothes. And the kids were forced to write thank you notes to all the donors because you need it in childish handwriting.
This is crazy.

Speaker 1 Sometimes they would have American donors stop by that work with like adoption agencies in America or even big churches in America.

Speaker 1 They would fly to Korea to visit brothers' home and everyone would prepare for months. The kids would put on plays.
They would dance around. They'd be forced to do all these things.

Speaker 1 And then once they leave, they have to give everything back.

Speaker 1 The basement would be filled with those donated clothes and

Speaker 1 they would sell them. another layer of profit, sold to local clothing stores.

Speaker 1 This one odd time, a bunch of donors donated a bunch of cows, cattle, to be used for consumption.

Speaker 1 And Han said they took the cow and paraded it around the field, taking pictures with all of us smiling with the cow and showed it off and everybody was so happy thinking we would get beef bone soup or something the next day.

Speaker 1 And the next day, it was just rotten oil broth. No beef.
They took the cows to the market to be sold.

Speaker 1 But the worst part for nine-year-old Han is not even the fact that he's not drinking beef bone soup.

Speaker 1 It's the fact that he was taken with his 12-year-old sister and his older sister keeps trying to escape with him.

Speaker 1 Every single time she stands in the field, she would sprint towards him, ready to escape with him, but she has no plan. She has no plan.

Speaker 1 She would just try to grab his hand and say, I'm going to protect you. Let's go.
We're going to go home. And every time she would get slammed down onto the ground and beaten in front of Han.

Speaker 1 He says the beatings, torture, and punishments, it wouldn't stop her from getting to me. Han says about his sister, you know, my older sister was especially smart.

Speaker 1 So our researchers actually met Han and his older sister.

Speaker 1 They left like a video message for us as well, but he says his older sister is especially smart and capable, which our researchers actually noted and we'll talk about that in part three.

Speaker 1 She's like the only blood relative that taught Han. anything because they're poor village kids.
He doesn't know how to write. She would teach him.

Speaker 1 And then on their way home one day, this is when they were free. He saw this tarikwana cart.
It's just all full circle. Okay, he sees this tariwana cart, the candy cart.

Speaker 1 And he's like, sister, can I get a tari guana? And she doesn't have money. So she says, you know what? I'm going to go home and I'm going to make it for you.

Speaker 1 He says, my sister put a ladle on the briquette stove. It was her first time doing this.
She poured in sugar.

Speaker 1 added a little bit of soda and she was about to complete the targona with the chopsticks when I kept pushing on her and like dragging her shirt saying can you hurry I really want targona and she dropped the ladle it fell all over her foot she has a severe burn because the sugar crystallizes and it sticks to you all over her foot he says I still remember that incident and when their dad who both of them thought was very scary he would come home and ask Sine what happened to your foot And she would quickly respond, I dropped a pot while I was making soup.

Speaker 1 Don't worry about it. Han says his sister was always somebody that protected him.

Speaker 1 And even now, she keeps trying to protect him by having them escape but all that's happening is she keeps getting beat over and over again. She would run to him in the cafeteria trying to hug him.

Speaker 1 Father's gonna come find us okay don't be scared. Father's gonna come find us.
He says you can't imagine how difficult it was to look at each other in that atmosphere of fear.

Speaker 1 Rather than being a source of support or comfort for each other, it just became more painful. I lived witnessing my sister gradually losing her mind.

Speaker 1 Okay, so in the book, it's very explicit, but I think he would rather it not be explicit. So

Speaker 1 Ahan mentions that people from his sister's platoon would come to him and report back the types of torture that were inflicted on her because she tried to save her brother.

Speaker 1 And the types of torture, you can imagine what they are, especially being a woman in a facility like this. In some sick, twisted way, some of the kids would even taunt him about it.

Speaker 1 He said, I lived witnessing my sister gradually losing her mind. First, it was just this panic of we got to get out of here.
I'm going to help us escape.

Speaker 1 And then slowly she would start talking to the walls. She would do anything.
It doesn't matter. She wouldn't feel her own pain of being beat.

Speaker 1 When Han got beat on the field, she would run and cover his body with her own. And it would just result in both of them getting beat.
And her torture was, I mean, both of them were essayed.

Speaker 1 during their time there, but it was just really bad. He says, I lived witnessing my sister gradually losing her mind.

Speaker 1 If she had been completely out of my sight, I might have forgotten her existence entirely. But because she was next to me for three years and six months, I witnessed everything and I can't forget it.

Speaker 1 Every time his sister would be in the field, the guards would laugh, the weirdo's coming, the weirdo's coming again, she's starting again.

Speaker 1 And without fail, when Han would look, it would be his sister running towards him, trying to help him escape.

Speaker 1 And the guards that were laughing, what, two seconds ago, suddenly they yank her down by the hair as she rushes towards him, throws her onto the ground and drags her away forcibly to torture her eventually she was taken to the psych ward where han would climb the window just to see her there was a few platoon leaders that he liked like the guards where they were tall and they would let him climb on top of their shoulders to see in through the window just to see his sister and he thought maybe if she sees my face she'll get better and she won't lose her mind and she'll realize okay i gotta get out of here strong but when he looks into the room she doesn't even recognize him because

Speaker 1 she is not there. They have her on so many, they have her on antipsychotics that she does not need on high doses every single day.
She's in a daze. She just has a glaze.
It's like they're zombies.

Speaker 1 That's how they describe them. He says, every time I went to check on my sister to see if she was ever getting better, she was always laying down with her hands tied.

Speaker 1 There was nothing I could do for my sister. All I could do every day was pray that my father would come and save us.

Speaker 1 He says his biggest regret was before she was taken to the psych ward, one of the leaders was beating his sister, the guard, and they told Han, I'm not going to stop until you repeat after me.

Speaker 1 Don't fucking come find me, you stupid bitch.

Speaker 1 And they would make Han repeat it over and over again because he wasn't saying it with conviction, obviously.

Speaker 1 And he's just crying as he's screaming at his sister and she's on the ground and she still tries to come save him the next day. Then one day, Han hears a voice that he recognizes behind him.

Speaker 1 Have you been well?

Speaker 1 And he freezes. He can't even turn around.
How's your sister doing? It's his dad.

Speaker 1 He's in a tracksuit too? Just like Jung's dad, Han's dad is in a suit, a tracksuit.

Speaker 1 Han writes in his book, I tasted despair. I hated my father to death.
because he dropped them off at the police station. And he was never particularly the best father even prior.

Speaker 1 He said, the thought that I could never escape this place now tormented me. And now this man is wondering, how's your sister doing? Han scoffs.
She's gone. She's no longer there.

Speaker 1 Seeing his dad, Han said he just had this overwhelming feeling. And these were the words that kept repeating in his mind while he was in the welfare center, which is, with a knife, with a knife.

Speaker 1 He didn't know what it meant. It was just always with a knife.
I'm going to do it with a knife, with a knife.

Speaker 1 The next time Han would ever see his dad outside of brother's home, he would have a knife in his pocket ready to kill him. That is part two of Squid Games, the real story behind Squid Games.

Speaker 1 Part three, we will tell you what happened to Han and Han's sister, Han's dad, as well as all the other victims who were outside of the National Assembly and also the family who does not get punished and are in Australia living as millionaires.

Speaker 1 So stay tuned for part three. leave your thoughts in the comments, and stay safe.
I'll see you in the next one.

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