A particularly tragic feature of the Korean War has been the number of families permanently separated by the war and the division of the Korean peninsula.
All wars are tragic and have their own particular sorts of pain and loss. But a prominent feature of the Korean War was that families were cut off from one another. There had already been much dispersion of Korean families during Japanese occupation of the peninsula during World War II. About a quarter of Korean families were already separated when the Korean War broke out in 1950, and when that war ended with a permanent division into North and South Korea, those families have remained unable to reconnect with their relatives on the other side of the border.