Al Jazeera Podcasts.

Today, falsified adoption records and a hidden legacy of war in South Korea.

It's the sickest thing that you can do to a person, of course, taking away his family,

his relatives, his roots. What one black adoptee hopes to find, and what that means for

hundreds of thousands of other Korean adoptees. I'm Malika Bilal, and this is The Take.

My name is Anna Cook.

I am a field producer with AJ Plus Reports, and I am based in New York City, but I was in Korea last year

to film two special stories in South Korea. Anna, it's really good to have you here on the take.

You spent about a month reporting in South Korea, and while you were there, you got to know a man

named Simone. His roots are in Korea, but he's from

the Netherlands. I'm Simon Hokweda. I'm from the Netherlands. I was born as Kim Kwanji. My birthplace,

I'm not sure where it was, because it's demolished. And it could be right behind me, or it could be in front of me.

You joined him in investigating a mystery about how that came to be, and you made it into a documentary.

So tell me about this mystery and tell me about Simone.

So I met Simone in October of 2023 last year in South Korea because he was searching

for his birth mother and he had returned to South Korea after more than 50 years.

He left Korea when he was four years old when he was adopted to a white family in the Netherlands.

And he had to do that because he was biracial.

He was born from a U.S. black soldier and a Korean mother.

And because of laws at the time, he had no choice but to leave and to be adopted to another family in the Netherlands.

Wow.

And so he came back to his home city called Pajou, which is right near the border between

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