Esther Ahn Kim
1908-1997 20th century
Memory as the last possession, when everything else is confiscated.
Who was Esther Ahn Kim?
A music teacher in a Christian school in occupied Korea, in 1939 she refused to bow with her pupils at the Shinto shrine. Knowing what awaited her, she learned dozens of chapters of the Bible by heart before her arrest. She spent six years in Japanese prisons, where she recited for the other women what she had carried in her memory.
In their own words
I read the Bible earnestly and had a new concern to memorize important chapters against the day when I would be in prison without my Bible.
If I perish, I perish.