"And you would not tell him their names?"
"I would rather have been beaten to death than give him their names!"
"Thank God for your courage!" said the missionary, for she had seen the girl's body when she had gotten out of prison; the burns of cigarette stumps all over her beautiful skin; the scars, the whip marks; the desecrations.
When I was told this story, amid the tears of the narrator, an American college woman, she concluded with fire in her soul: "I have never seen such courage on the part of women in all my life! Even mere girls and children have it. Most of those who are arrested come out of our American Missionary schools. There isn't a one of them who doesn't have in her soul the spirit of Joan of Arc. If France had one Joan of Arc, Korea has ten thousand!"
One young girl of whom I heard was kept in prison under constant torture for six months. And a cruel imprisonment it is. I visited this prison myself one winter day when I was in Korea. The thermometer was at zero; the snow covered the ground, and there wasn't a fire in a single room in that prison save where the Japanese guards were staying, and they were huddled around a roaring coal stove.
And this is the show prison of the whole Peninsula. The Japanese take visitors through it. But to an American even it is fit only for the darkness of the Middle Ages.
In its limited quarters I saw ten and fifteen young girls, sweet faced, cultured, educated school girls, huddled together in narrow rooms, without a single chair, so closely packed that they were seated on the floor like bees in a hive.
After six months of this awful life the girl of whom I speak was about to be released.
The guard questioned her. "Now what are you going to do?"
Her answer came, quick as a shot, although she knew that it would send her back to the hell from which she was about to be released.