hankyoreh

Sticky notes with messages mourning the victims of the Halloween crowd crush cover the walls of Exit No. 1 of Itaewon Station in November 2022. (Shin So-young/The Hankyoreh)

“Tell me, did I kill anyone back then?” Park Hyo-jin asked, voice shaking.

A survivor of the Itaewon crowd crush, Park, a pseudonym, had been swept off on her own into the narrow T-shaped alley in which the unthinkable occurred on Oct. 29, 2022. She barely made it out alive.

The agony of being squeezed under such a level of physical pressure was so severe that she had to cover herself in pain relief patches for several days afterward. But the words she heard after surviving the tragedy cut deeper than any of the physical injuries she sustained.

“I think that the victims were perpetrators, too,” one of her close friends said to her not long after the incident, the friend’s logic being that the victims at the scene were also perpetrators as they would have pushed other people while stuck in the crowd. Those words left a lasting wound on Park.

“I’m still not okay, really,” the young woman said again and again while speaking to the Hankyoreh on Sunday. “I’m not okay.”

A year has passed since the terrible disaster, yet still no government officials have been held accountable. Those who have been brought to trial place the blame on their seniors, arguing that they themselves are not responsible for anything.

The Constitutional Court exonerated the nation’s chief safety officer, who faced impeachment charges, finding that he did indeed do wrong, but not enough to warrant dismissal. All that remains is the number of victims: 159.

On Oct. 31, 2022, a police officer comforts a local merchant named Nam In-seok who brought food to the cordoned-off alleyway where the crowd crush happened in honor of the victims. (Shin So-young/The Hankyoreh)

Survivor guilt has quickly filled the void left by this lack of accountability.

The disgust many of those who made it out feel for having survived still haunts them. Park Hyo-jin confessed to being angered by personal attacks, such as the remark that victims were in the wrong too, but finds herself wondering if her actions really did lead to anyone else’s death.

Another survivor, 23-year-old Dong Eun-jin, also battled a sense of guilt.

“People were performing CPR at the scene, and I blamed myself for so long for not actively helping. I also kept thinking that people were injured because I was there and added to the density of the people, and that the tragedy escalated because I couldn’t do anything to help,” she shared.

Kim Cho-rong, who recently published her book “Am I a Disaster Survivor?” also told the Hankyoreh that in the immediate wake of the tragedy, she blamed herself for not being able to perform CPR.

Park had always been a people person but now she feels on edge whenever she’s around others. After being subjected to countless insults concerning the tragedy, she said that she “finds it difficult to trust people.”

“The bereaved are in cahoots with the Democratic Party,” people told her. “You shouldn’t be so proud of the fact that you went to Itaewon and survived.” These are only a few of the remarks she heard from various acquaintances in the days and weeks after the disaster, while she was suffering from acute stress disorder.

“Now, whenever I meet someone, I’m afraid to talk to them, since I can’t help but wonder if they share the same damning sentiments,” she says. “The words ‘They died because they wanted to spend a rowdy night out’ hit me so hard and were what affected me the most. I don’t want to try to understand the people who speak cruelly of the people who were at Itaewon. They weren’t there. They didn’t see how horrible it really was,” Dong said, exasperated.

For the survivors, there is no going back to before the disaster. Even the most ordinary daily routines can feel suffocating. Park sometimes feels the urge to change clothes several times because she feels like she can’t breathe in what she’s wearing. She’s thrown away all her bras with wire in them. These were things that she’d never given a second thought to before that night in Itaewon.

A note reading “Rest easy. Rest in peace. I’m sorry,” is dampened by the rain after falling from the memorial space for the Itaewon crowd crush in August. (Baek So-ah/The Hankyoreh)

There were days when she couldn’t bring herself to fasten her seatbelt properly because of the pressure on her chest. Since the disaster, Kim said, she feels like ordinary objects around her are attacking her. Crowded streets are now terrifying. “I feel like I’ve lost all sense of normalcy,” she said.

Dong has been traveling only by taxi or in her own car since the tragedy, after experiencing shortness of breath while trying to ride the subway. “This has never happened to me before,” she said. “I think that experiencing the tragedy made me this way.”

Park says that Korean society is “still ignorant when it comes to comforting people who’ve been through disasters.”

“There’s this widespread sense that disasters aren’t any of their business,” she said while asking that people withhold hurtful comments about survivors.

By Kwak Jin-san, staff reporter

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