Emigres and Exiles
<D David Hyun 1997
by David Hyun
Korean American Museum
April 25, 1997
With all the confidence in the world, I speak for all the people of Korean ancestry, in Korea,
Manchuria, Siberia, China, Mexico, and here in America, in saying that the Korean people honor
the European Artists who fled Nazi Germany and were compelled to choose the painful choice of'
survival as Emigres and Exiles.
Why my confidence?
A core of Korean values, compressed, hammered, and honed in 4200 years of history, is to respect
and to honor persons of culture as representing the highest of virtues. Koreans thus honor the
European Artists who refused to serve Hitler and chose to serve Truth as Emigres and Exiles.
Koreans also have immense simpatico for Emigres and Exiles. For the past hundred years,
thousands upon thousands of Koreans were forced into the life of Emigres and Exiles.
The history of genocide of the Jews and the exodus of culture from Western Europe amazingly
follows the genocidal destruction of Korean life and culture.
In the 1930s, the governments of Western Europe dilly-dallied over an uncomfortable problem:
What to do with a revived Germany led by a former corporal, Adolf Hitler, who sought the
expansion of German lands. The Prime Minister of Great Britain, Neville Chamberlain, wrought the
Munich Pact which supposedly would establish for the Western Powers "Peace in our
Time" - without much cost to the Great Powers. The Munich Pact permitted Nazi Germany to
march, unopposed, for the take-over of Sudetenland. The Allied strategy was to sacrifice another
nation, Czechoslovakia, for the good of Europe.
The Munich strategy backfired. Nazi Germany, fed with the nutritious diet of appeasement,
fattened into a pig nation of insatiable appetite which ate and ate and ate other nations.
Emigres and Exiles - page 1