Netflix Series “The Echoes of Survivors: Inside Korea’s Tragedies” Features “Brothers Home” Horrors.
Posted to Paperslip on August 17th, 2025.
Trigger Warning for extreme violence against children and adults.
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We recently watched the first two episodes of Netflix’s new series “The Echoes of Survivors: Inside Korea’s Tragedies”, which featured the stories of Brothers Home of Busan survivors. We were deeply moved and impressed by the portrayal of the Brothers Home victims, whose stories we have been following in the media since 2020.
Brothers Home is now known as one of the most notorious concentration camps in S. Korean history, and operated as a detention center for supposed “vagrants” of all ages from 1975-1987. When “Squid Game” came out, we immediately made the connection to Brothers Home, given the similarity of the outfits and the thematic content of the series. It’s also a bit ironic that the Squid Game’s Director’s family is from the Ssangmung-dong area, where the campus of KSS (Korea Social Service) was located from 1964 — 2012.
We have long had interest in Brothers Home of Busan given its proximity to one of KSS’ main “feeder orphanages” — Nam Kwang Orphanage of Busan. It has always seemed inevitable to us that some children adopted to the West through KSS (Korea Social Service) — and other Korean Adoption Agencies for whom Nam Kwang Orphanage in Busan supplied children, such as Holt — would have come from Brothers Home. Nam Kwang and Brothers Home were massive facilities within reasonably close proximity in Busan, which was one of S. Korea’s main hubs of S. Korean children who entered the pipeline for international adoption. So despite the scant evidence of a systemic connection between Brothers Home and Nam Kwang Orphanage of Busan — largely due to the fact that much of the paperwork from Brothers Home was destroyed by its owners in the wake of it’s “discovery” in 1986 — we find it inevitable that they would have been in some ways linked.
One thing which was confirmed by one of the documentary’s female subjects at the beginning of Episode 2 was the connection between rape by Brothers Home guards / inmates and adoption. There is just one story unfortunately in the 2 episodes about Brothers Home which explores this topic, but given the sensitivity of the subject matter and the extraordinary culture of shame embedded within S. Korea, we found the woman’s willingness to come forward and speak about her experiences profoundly heartbreaking and brave. For this writer, it was frankly a relief to hear a long held suspicion be confirmed by a first person witness, rather than by a secondary report.
Given that Brothers Home imprisoned roughly 30,000 “vagrant” inmates between 1975-1986 or 1987, the numbers of babies and children sent into the pipeline for international adoption from Brothers Home will likely never be known. But we think it would be impossible that some of these children from Brothers Home would not make it into the pipeline for international adoption through the connection of Nam Kwang Orphanage in Busan to KSS (and other Korean Adoption Agencies) in Seoul.
The firsthand accounts of Brothers Home victims featured in the Netflix series are highly compelling. While many of those interviewed have previously appeared in various print articles and video interviews, this is the first time as many victims’ stories have been presented all together in a professional documentary-style format.
Survivors of Brothers Home have been central to the launch of the second Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC 2) investigation, which began only after their persistent lobbying efforts at Korea’s National Assembly. Initially, TRC 2 was intended to focus solely on the major concentration camps within S. Korea. However, the scope of the investigation was expanded to include Overseas Adoption on December 7th, 2022.
Notably, prior to this expansion, we had submitted summaries of heavily falsified Korean Adoptee cases to the head of the TRC on December 18th, 2020. The official TRC 2 investigation itself commenced just 8 days prior, on December 10th, 2020 — again, largely due to the relentless advocacy of the Brothers Home survivors — to whom Korean Adoptees are indebted for pushing so hard for an investigation.
You can find everything we have written on Paperslip over the years about Brothers Home using this Google search trick.
Kudos to Netflix for exploring this dark topic. We hope to see more Korean adoption related topics explored on this platform.