While North Koreans are mourning their late leader Kim Jong-il, a defector from the communist country now living in South Korea felt relieve that the man responsible for killing her family and destroying her life is now dead.

"I can't ever forgive, ever," said Kim Young-soon, 74, referring to the North Korean dictator who died from heart attack on Saturday, according to L.A. Times. "North Korea took away the best years of my life. I suffered because of Kim Jong Il."

The vice president of the Seoul-based group Committee for the Democratization of North Korea said the dictator ordered her and her family imprisoned at the Yodeok Political Offenders' Concentration Camp in the 1970s because they know his first wife, Sung Hye-rim, who was a divorcee and five years older than him. But Young-soon only found out the reason for their imprisonment years later after her parents, husband and sons died at the camp.

A trained dancer, Young-soon was a close friend of actress Sung, who was already married and had a child when Kim married her. To keep the union secret and avoid a scandal, Pyongyang officials rounded up all of Sung's friends and sent them to Yodeok to silence them.

From 1970, Young-soon, then 15, spent the next 10 years at the camp and survived hard labor and punishments. She was released in 1989 and at age 65, she defected to South Korea, where she wrote a book about her experience.

In the 2008 book entitled "I was Sung Hye-rim's Friend," she described her ordeal at the hands of Kim, whom she never met.
In an excerpt of the book, she wrote, "I was sent to Yodeok prison camp because I knew Kim Jong Il was with Sung Hye-rim. Even Kim Il-sung was not aware of Kim Jong Il's relationship with Sung. Kim Jong Il, a would-be No.1 leader of the republic, was in a relationship with a (once) married woman would be a huge scandal, and Kim Jong Il tried to keep the highest security."

Young-soon said that aside from her and her family, the families and relatives of workers at a hospital where Sung gave birth to Kim's first son were incarcerated to hide the birth.

In September, Young-soon and other former North Korean political prisoners appeared at a hearing of the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs subcommittee. Her appeal: "I have lived a life of tears of blood and hardship. Please save the 23 million people in North Korea who are living a life of misery not unlike what I suffered."

Kim Young-soon, left.