I was very much impressed by the magnanimity and decency of Rev. When I first read the novel in my adolescent years, I understood it as a moving examination of the theological and existential agonies of a man thrown into an absurd situation. Shin refuses to unveil the truth and protects the honor of the twelve ministers by telling the people that they were heroic martyrs who died bravely and it was he who betrayed them. They want to take revenge for the deaths. Shin and even try to lynch him because they believe he is a betrayer of his faith and fellow clergymen. Not knowing the truth, angry Christians shout, “Judas!” to Rev. Han live because he became insane after witnessing the shocking turn of the event. Shin go because he had the courage to defiantly refuse to denounce God despite his imminent death. Shin, but the 12 others who betrayed God and begged for mercy, pathetically sniveling. A captured North Korean intelligence major reveals that it was not Rev. Soon, however, he learns that this is not the case. Shin denounced God and betrayed his 12 fellow ministers in order to avoid the execution. Lee to investigate the incident, in which the two have mysteriously survived.Ĭhang intends to use the incident for purposes of political propaganda by making the 12 clergymen into heroic martyrs whose execution by North Korean communists exemplify the regime’s ruthless persecution of Christians. Chang, chief of Army intelligence, orders the narrator Capt. Han, who is younger and becomes insane due to his mental shock over the horrible incident.Īfter the South Korean troops occupy Pyongyang, Col. Shin, who is older and psychologically tormented after witnessing the execution of his colleagues, and Rev. Among them, 12 are executed and two released: Rev. Fourteen Christian ministers are arrested by the North Korean communists. The story of is set in Pyongyang, the capital city of North Korea, during the early stages of the Korean War. “The Martyred,” too, was a thought-provoking novel that resonates with Camus’s nihilistic existentialism and saturated with a philosophical rigor comparable to Dostoevsky. At the time, I was intrigued and mesmerized by the novels of Albert Camus and Fyodor Dostoevsky. When I first came across Richard Kim’s “The Martyred” in 1967, I was an intellectually adventurous and emotionally vulnerable college freshman.

The Martyred by Richard E. Kim