Netflix’s “The Echoes of Survivors: Inside Korea’s Tragedies” Docuseries Sparks Disgust, Backlash

Netflix‘s harrowing new docuseries, The Echoes of Survivors: Inside Korea’s Tragedies, has viewers up in arms for more reasons than one. Some of that outrage is directed at Netflix and how survivors were treated while filming.

The Echoes of Survivors: Inside Korea’s Tragedies, an eight-episode docuseries, is the follow-up to In the Name of God: A Holy Betrayal, a 2023 docuseries about Korean cults and the people who survived them. The Echoes of Survivors covers four different tragedies: Busan’s Brothers’ Home, the JMS church from In the Name of God: A Holy Betrayal, the “Chijon family” gang murders, and the Sampoong Department Store collapse.

Episode 1 dives into Brothers’ Home, an internment camp that operated as a “welfare facility” from 1975 to 1987 in Busan while Korea was under a military dictatorship. During this time, the Korean government gave so-called welfare centers like Brothers’ Home subsidies based on the number of people they took in. This gave the facilities the incentive to kidnap “vagrants” off the streets.

According to Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, anyone was at risk of being illegally detained, including “office workers who had fallen asleep outside after drinking too much, children waiting to take trains to visit relatives, teenagers on their way home, people with disabilities, and hospital patients.”

Brothers’ Home, which Korean media outlets have nicknamed “Korea’s Auschwitz,” was a place of horror where victims were abused physically and sexually, not paid for their labour, starved, and killed. Infants were also sold through adoption agencies. Approximately 647 of the 40,000 people who were imprisoned at Brothers’ Home were killed.

Viewers have expressed sympathy for the survivors but also anger toward Netflix for dressing them in tracksuits that resemble the ones they wore at Brothers’ Home when they were children.

These tracksuits bear a strong resemblance to the tracksuits in Netflix’s K-Drama Squid Game, which is rumored to have taken inspiration from the Brothers’ Home tragedy.

“Squid Game” IRL? The Truth About The Horrific Abuse Camp Believed To Have Inspired The Series

Viewers criticized the inclusion of those tracksuits and other unsettling aesthetic details, like the set dressings. One even compared it to dressing Holocaust survivors in striped prisoner uniforms.

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Watch the trailer here: