Their backs stooped, dozens of elderly North and South Koreans separated for six decades reunited today, weeping and embracing in a rush of words and emotion.
The reunions come during a rare period of detente between the rival Koreas and are all the more poignant because the participants will part again in a few days, likely forever.
About 80 elderly South Koreans travelled through falling snow with their families to North Korea's Diamond Mountain resort to meet children, brothers, sisters, spouses and other relatives. Seoul says about 180 North Koreans were expected.
South Korean TV showed elderly women in traditional hanbok dresses talking and hugging, families trading photographs of relatives who couldn't attend, men dressed in suits and ties wiping away tears and touching each other's faces as cameras flashed. One old man was wheeled in on a stretcher, a blue blanket wrapped tightly around him. An old woman in a wheelchair was rolled into the resort.
These Koreans are the lucky few: Millions of others have been separated from loved ones since the tumult and bloodshed of the three-year war that ended in 1953.
During a previous period of inter-Korean rapprochement, about 22,000 Koreans had brief reunions, 18,000 in person and the others by video. None got a second chance to reunite, Seoul says.
These emotional meetings, the first in more than three years because of high tensions, are a vivid reminder that despite 60 years of animosity, misunderstanding, threats and occasional artillery exchanges, the world's most heavily armed border divides a single people.
The reunion was arranged after impoverished North Korea began calling recently for better ties with South Korea, in what outside analysts say is an attempt to win badly needed foreign investment and aid.
