In addition to the orphans, more than 700 Korean students were accepted to Czechoslovak vocational, secondary, and higher education institutions between 1951 and 1953. Secondary school students were housed in a dormitory on Prague’s Dittrichova Street, nicknamed the Korean Youth Home. University students lived in dorms with Czech peers who supervised them and assisted with their studies. Schools monitored academic performance and reported to the Ministry of Education, which in turn informed the DPRK legation/embassy in Prague. The embassy played an important role in deciding the return of underperforming or regime-problematic students, as well as in ideological training, which gained increasing emphasis in later years.

Korean youth studied mainly technical fields in Czechoslovakia (machine tool manufacturing, metallurgy, steelmaking, construction, etc.), as well as languages, diplomacy, foreign trade, and chemistry. Students of Korean Studies contributed to their Czech language training. By the late 1950s, however, the DPRK changed policy, deeming it undesirable for Korean youth to study abroad. In autumn 1957, newly enrolled secondary school and vocational students from the orphan group were withdrawn. In 1962, all remaining students were recalled en masse, with only exceptions allowed to stay abroad. Educational exchanges continued on a smaller scale until the late 1980s.

During the hurried 1957 departure, three suitcases were left behind at the station. The luggage eventually reached its owners, but customs records give insight into their contents. Whether students could keep foreign literature after returning home remains unknown.

Reports from the Czechoslovak embassy in Pyongyang suggest contacts between embassy staff and returnees were discouraged, and foreign ties became undesirable in personnel profiles. Today, the fate of only one girl—who spent part of her childhood here—is known. According to Vladimír Pucek, Ryŏ Sungu completed full education in Czechoslovakia and undertook a bohemistics traineeship at Charles University’s Faculty of Arts, later heading the Czech department at Pyongyang University of Foreign Studies. Kwanbok, a boy whom Koreanist Jaroslav Bařinka helped with medical treatment and later study admission, was also accepted for studies. Despite being placed in Bařinka’s care, he had to return home too.