From North Korea to Budapest

In the 1950s around 1000 North Korean orphans and students were studying in Hungary. That was the first time that a sizeable East Asian community settled in Hungary and remained there for a number of years. This was also the first time that the Hungarian population encountered people from East Asia. The purpose of this book is to tell about the first interaction between these two faraway cultures. Another goal is to show the North Korean students’ role in the Hungarian revolution and anti Soviet freedom fight in 1956. Many former Hungarian freedom fighters declared that, during the time of the Hungarian revolution, they had got a lot of help from North Korean students. Most of these students already had war experience, as the men in their twenties had already fought in the battlefields of the Korean War. However their role in the Hungarian revolution has been very little known up to recent times. The book also reveals what happened next to the North Korean students, after their repatriation back to North Korea in December 1956.