SEOUL: Yoo Chang-sik gazes into a monitor in the North Korean capital but fails to recognize his sister on a video link from the South’s capital, just 220km away but separated by a fortified border for more than 50 years.

Yoo, 78, and his sister, Hyang-sik, 65, were one of 80 families picked to be reunited via a video link over two days starting on Monday.

The families were split in the turmoil when the two countries sealed their borders at the end of the 1950-53 Korean War.

“It has been so many years I don’t recognize your face,” he said in Pyongyang, weeping and holding a faded black-and-white photograph of his sister taken before they were torn apart during the Korean War. “It has been so long. I just don’t know.”

The Yoos are one of more than 100,000 families registered with the Red Cross societies of South and North Korea, hoping to be reunited in person or by video link.

“I knew you would find me one day, because you were always so smart,” Yoo Hyang-sik said, wiping away tears, according to pool reports provided by South Korea’s unification ministry.

Most of the 125,000 South Koreans looking for family members in the North are aged 70 or older, and time is running out for many of them to see, perhaps for the last time, lost family.

“We are going to have to study and talk about different ways of expanding the video reunions,” South Korean Unification Minister Lee Jong-seok said on Monday as he visited some of the family members preparing for the video reunion in Seoul.

—Reuters