Personal contacts between Czechoslovaks and North Koreans led to several mixed marriages. One such union was the marriage of Czechoslovak doctor MUDr. Karel Černý, CSc., to North Korean surgical and practical nurse Kim Kyŏngsuk. They met while working at the Ch’ŏngjin hospital and wed in 1956 in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang. Soon afterwards, they departed together for Czechoslovakia, and Kim Kyŏngsuk never returned to her homeland, as the DPRK never granted permission.

Kim Kyŏngsuk (1934-2020) was born in the North Korean village of Kosŏngdong and later moved with her family to the port city of Ch’ŏngjin. Despite being the youngest and physically weakest child from a poor family (her father worked as a farmer and her mother was a housewife), she managed to obtain a decent education and qualification as a surgical nurse. The family lost all their property due to Kyŏngsuk’s older brother and ended up in severe financial distress. Only her mother’s sewing machine remained, on which they relied on for a long time to earn a living. It was then that Kyŏngsuk learned to sew, and she later utilized this skill in Czechoslovakia, where she worked at the PRODEX company as a sewist of textile and leather goods (e.g., bags for gym shoes or children’s diapers). She did not apply her medical education after leaving Korea.

Karel Černý (1921-2001) graduated from the Faculty of Medicine at Charles University. He had a passion for travelling, and when he learned in the 1950s about the opportunity to serve in North Korea’s Ch’ŏngjin, he reportedly learned to hold conversations in Korean within three months and impressed the interview commission by singing the most famous Korean folk song, Arirang. The Černý couple had two children born in Czechoslovakia—a son, Miran (born 1957), and a daughter, Tamara (born 1965). Kim Kyŏngsuk attended Czech language courses at Charles University and mastered the language. However, since she did not teach Korean to her children, it became the couple’s “secret language”, which the children could not understand. The father’s profession enabled the family to travel abroad (Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria). From 1966 to 1971, they also stayed in West African Ghana, where Karel Černý worked on research into the use of flour from winged bean pods (Psophocarpus tetragonolobus) in milk-free infant nutrition. The family spent over four and a half years there across three stints. After the first and second stints, they were entitled to vacations in Czechoslovakia, during which they visited numerous European major cities and even crossed the ocean. The older son, Miran, attended an international school in Ghana for children of foreigners and wealthy Ghanaians, while daughter Tamara did not start first grade until back in Prague. Karel Černý’s final overseas work trip took place in the mid-1980s to Libya. Due to his alleged passive stance toward the political events of 1968, he had been expelled from the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia upon returning from Ghana, making trips to capitalist countries in his case undesirable.

The Černý family maintained close ties with the Bazal couple—another Czechoslovak-North Korean pair—during their stay in Ghana and later in Czechoslovakia as well. From the 1980s onwards, the Černý couple rented a room in their house to foreign guests, and Kim Kyŏngsuk met Korean tourists from South Korea or Japan, with whom she then maintained regular correspondence. Kim Kyŏngsuk did not publicly acknowledge her North Korean origins very often; only on national holidays and other significant days (e.g., the celebration of Kim Ilsung’s birthday) did she go with her daughter to the North Korean embassy in Prague—in the vain hope that one day she would be allowed to travel to the DPRK and reunite with her family. The only concrete proof that she had relatives in the DPRK were sporadic letters and packages with various contents; North Korean dried fish were very popular in the Černý family.