The True Stories Behind Echoes of Survivors: Inside Korea’s Tragedies

At first glance, Netflix’s The Echoes of Survivors: Inside Korea’s Tragedies doesn’t have a clear, specific framework. The eight-episode docu-series is a follow-up to 2023’s In the Name of God: A Holy Betrayal, expanding its focus beyond Korean cults to examine other horrific events that continue to cause trauma and pain in Korean society today. However, as the series goes on, a loosely overarching theme becomes clear: an examination of the lengths people will go for money in a society that allows for, encourages, or rewards the accumulation of wealth above all else.

The eight-episode series covers four different events in Korean history—including Busan’s Brothers’ Home, a follow-up on the legal cases connected to JMS church, the “Chijon family” gang murders, and the Sampoong Department Store collapse—through interviews with survivors and witnesses, as well as dramatic reenactments of the crimes and footage from news coverage of the events.

At times, the series tips into what feels like unnecessarily exploitative behavior, such as dressing the survivors of the Brothers’ Home facility in the same tracksuits they were forced to wear as abused children or in the episodes that recount the Chijon gang murders, also known as the Jijonpa serial murder case. In the latter case, justice has been served and it is unclear what purpose watching the sole survivor of the gang’s crimes relive the most traumatic event of her life serves, other than as trauma porn. For a series that is ostensibly working to examine the dangers that come within systems that prioritize the accumulation of wealth over human life, these moments feel like a misstep. 

The cases examined in The Echoes of Survivors will all be familiar to Korean audiences, but perhaps not to global audiences. Most of the cases presented took place during the 80s and 90s in Korea, before the internet, streaming video, and mobile devices kept us so apprised of manmade horrors being perpetrated on the other side of the world. For those who aren’t familiar with the subjects covered in Echoes of Survivors, here is a brief explanation of each event. 

(Content warning: This contains descriptions of child abuse and sexual violence)

The history behind Brothers Home

Brothers Home, or Hyungje Bokjiwon, was an internment camp operating as a “welfare facility” in Busan, Korea’s second-largest city. It operated from 1975 to 1987, and was propped up by anti-vagrancy ordinances, put in place in the 1960s and ramped up in the lead up to the 1986 Asian Games and the 1988 Summer Olympics. At the time, Korea was under a military dictatorship, which was overthrown in 1987.

Brothers Home was owned and run by Park In-geun, a retired military man and a Christian social worker. During this “social cleansing” period in Korea’s history, these “welfare” facilities were given subsidies from the government based on the number of people they took in. More residents meant more money, so facility management would kidnap people off of the streets, whether or not they fit the description of a “vagrant,” or someone without a stable job or home. 

According to Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, those illegally detained off the streets included “office workers who had fallen asleep outside after drinking too much, children waiting to take trains to visit relatives, teenagers on their way home, people with disabilities, and hospital patients.” Echoes of Survivors focuses on some of the children who were forced into the facility, in many cases kidnapped off of the streets by police officers, many of whom were incentivized by Brothers Home bribes and/or performance score points.

Inside the facility, violence was perpetrated daily. This included physical and sexual abuse against women and children. Infants were sold through adoption agencies. Detainees were forced to perform unpaid labor, often with very little food. An estimated 657 people were killed. In total, an estimated 40,000 people were confined at the group residence over the course of its operation, with more than 3,000 people held at once at the facility’s “peak.”

The second episode that covers Brothers Home shifts to a search for greater accountability. Ultimately, Park In-geun was found guilty for only embezzlement and corruption, and served just 30 months in prison. He was never found guilty of any human rights abuses, seemingly at least in part due to his political allies in President Chun Doo-hwan’s administration and the Busan mayor’s office, and died in a nursing home in 2016. 

In running the facility, Park In-geun appointed loyal family members as directors, including his wife, Lim Sung-soon; her brother Lim Young-soon; and Lim Young-soon’s brother-in-law, Joo Chong-chan. Echoes of Survivors sees producer Jo Seong-hyeon and Brothers Home survivor Choi Seung-woo travel to Australia, where some members of the Park family moved after the atrocities of the Brothers Home were made public. They confront some of the living members of the Park family about the wealth they have inherited. Jo also confronts a member of the Park family still living in Korea about his alleged role in the human rights abuses. These scenes make for some of the most powerful, productive moments in the series.

Did Brothers Home inspire Squid Game?

The Brothers Homes facility has been posited as inspiration for Squid Game in the past. The production perhaps intentionally plays up the aesthetic connection between the real-life atrocities of the Brothers Home and the fictional horrors of Squid Game by having survivors wear tracksuits like the ones they were forced to wear as children while giving interviews. However, Squid Game creator Hwang Dong-hyuk has never directly cited Brothers Home as an inspiration for the series.

The JMS cult case

When In the Name of God: A Holy Betrayal hit Netflix in March 2023, it shook Korean society. The docu-series, which examines abuses perpetrated by four different religious cults, leads with a focus on Christian Gospel Mission—also known as Providence and as Jesus Morning Star, or JMS. 

Jung Myeong-seok is the founder of JMS and a self-proclaimed messiah to his tens of thousands of followers across Korea and the world, including in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, and Australia. After being convicted of rape in 2008 and serving a decade in prison, he was indicted again in 2022 for the sexual assault of two female followers. The story of these two survivors, Maple and Amy, were told in the first season of the Netflix documentary. At the time, producer Jo noted that he wanted to tell this story because members of his family have been victims of a pseudo-religious cult.

Echoes of Survivors uses two of its episodes to expand on how Jung Myeong-seok’s pattern of sexual abuse was kept secret for so long, and the measures to which the organization went to try to keep In the Name of God from being released. Part of this is delving into the role Jung’s second-in-command, Jung Jo-eun, played in allowing his abuse of female followers to continue. Last year, she was sentenced to seven years in prison for her role in the abuses. Jung was sentenced to another 17 years in prison in 2024. The docu-series also alleges that members of JMS who are also police officers abused their positions to try to keep Jung out of jail. It wonders just how many Korean institutions include loyal members of JMS. 

The episodes end with Maple, who is now married to former idol and Olympic swimmer Alex Fong. The couple is expecting their first child. The final JMS episode leaves viewers with this message from Maple: “To every woman out there going through the same pain as me, let’s stay strong.”

The Chijon family murders

The “Chijon family” murders, also known as the Jijonpa serial murder case, refer to a series of crimes that took place between 1993 and 1994. The “Chiwon family” was a gang organized by convicted rapist Kim Gi-hwan, motivated by class anger. Kim convinced six other working class men, aged 18 to 23 at the time, to join him in targeting rich people for extortion and murder. He came up with the idea for the gang after watching a news report about university entrance exam corruption. The gang planned to collect one billion won (roughly $1.25 million at the time). They killed five people, including one of their own members who tried to leave the group.

The episodes are built around an interview with the sole survivor of the gang’s kidnappings, Lee Jeong-su. In her 20s at the time, she was kidnapped alongside a man she was casually dating. The two were not wealthy, but were driving a Hyundai Grandeur, a car that was considered a sign of wealth at the time. Lee was held by the gang for seven days and was forced to kill several of their targets, including her boyfriend. Upon Lee’s escape, facilitated by one of the members of the gang, she reported the crimes to the police. They apprehended the members, who were later sentenced to death. 

In the episode pair’s final act, Echoes of Survivors makes a rushed, incomplete effort to place the murders in a more systemic context. Most murder is informed by broader systemic injustices and true crime media often fails to contextualize its horrors, leading to narratives that contort perpetrators into monsters rather than products of our flawed social systems. Echoes of Survivors makes an attempt to contextualize the Chijon gang’s crimes, but it feels hollow after so much of the runtime presents sensationalized media coverage and dramatic reenactments of the crimes without deeper analysis, especially in a docu-series ostensibly focused on survivors’ stories. 

The Sampoong Department Store collapse

The final two episodes of The Echoes of Survivors examine Korea’s worst “peacetime” disaster in history: the Sampoong Department Store collapse. In 1995, five years after its opening, one of Seoul’s most luxurious department stores collapsed, killing 502 people and injuring another 937. More than half of the victims were employees. Many of the customers in the building at the time of collapse, in the early evening, were women shopping for dinner groceries.

The episodes include interviews with some of the survivors of the incident, including then 18-year-old store clerk Yoo Ji-hwan, who was pulled from the wreckage almost 12 days after the initial collapse. The docu-series also includes interviews with some of the people who lost family members in the disaster, and people who assisted in the rescue efforts.

The collapse came about as a result of shoddy construction that knowingly broke safety requirements in place at the time. The company originally contracted to build the massive, flat-slab structure left the project after Lee Joon, chairman of the Sampoong Group’s construction division, demanded changes to the design that would allow for a more spacious floor plan. Subsequent investigations determined the building was not structurally sound, and was bound to collapse. 

As much as two months prior to the collapse, employees had noticed a large crack on the roof of the top floor, where the building had begun to crumble. On the day of the collapse, the structural damage became more obvious. As the docu-series recounts, department store management held an emergency meeting at 3pm, roughly three hours before the collapse, to determine if they should close down and evacuate the building. Led by Lee, they voted only to close the fifth floor, wanting to wait until after work hours to inspect the building. Lee didn’t want to lose business. Emergency alarms were sounded at 5:50pm, and employees started evacuating shoppers. Two minutes later, the roof and fifth floor of the south wing collapsed, triggering a catastrophic collapse all the way to the basement floors.

Lee was later found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and served seven years, six months in prison. His son, Lee Han-sang, who was also president of the store, was convicted of corruption and accidental homicide. Two city planners were convicted of taking bribes. Two months after the collapse, Lee Joon and Lee Han-sang offered the entirety of the Sampoong Group’s wealth to help compensate the victims and their families. The former site of the department store houses a luxury high-rise apartment building, despite requests from the victims’ families that a memorial be built. Impeached president Yoon Suk-yeol lived in the building before and after his truncated term as president.

Echoes of Survivors’ builds some connective tissue between incidents like the Sampoong Department Store collapse and more recent Korean disasters, including the Sewol ferry disaster, as preventable manmade tragedies driven by greed. Like other moments in the eight installments, it is left to the viewer to decide how effectively the docu-series walks the line between civic-minded investigative journalism designed to hold power to account and the sensationalization of tragedy for entertainment value.