Life was hard for Pega Crimbchin even before the Korean War erupted and made her a refugee fleeing Communist invaders.

Crimbchin of Cabot and her daughter Katie Schell of Irwin, who wrote “Love Beyond Measure: Memoirs of a Korean War Bride,” about her mother, gave a presentation last month at the Maridon Museum, 232 N. McKean St., as part of the museum’s “Taste of Korea” event.

Crimbchin was born Ock Soon Lee in 1933 in Japanese-controlled Korea and grew up as an orphan, becoming a servant in other people’s homes.

After World War II, the country was divided at the 38th parallel with the Russians occupying the north and the Americans the south.

On June 25, 1950, North Korea invaded the south and captured its capital Seoul, where Crimbchin lived.

Without family or friends, Crimbchin survived the fighting.

“I give glory to God,” Crimbchin said. “I didn’t know God, but God knew me. He preserved me for this time.

“I don’t know how I survived such a dangerous place,” Crimbchin said.

“Communist soldiers ordered everyone to come out of the house,” Crimbchin said. “They separated the politicians, the boys, the girls. Next thing I know I ended up in a camp.

“I was a servant girl. Nobody talked to me one on one. I couldn’t understand what was said,” she said.

Schell said her mother left the camp, where the women were trained to be soldiers. Schell said the women were forced to march ahead of regular Communist troops to draw fire and set off land mines, and most were killed.

Crimbchin said she returned to where she lived and was servant to a woman, her two sons and a grandmother.

The Communist occupiers forced the residents to build roads using picks and shovels.

While the first battle for Seoul was relatively bloodless and quick, after American Gen. Douglas McArthur landed 70,000 Marines and soldiers at Inchon, the second battle for the capital in September 1950 heavily damaged the city.

“We were caught in the middle of the shooting. We stayed in the house for three days and nights, hungry and thirsty. Finally, the shooting slowed down,” Crimbchin said

They emerged to a changed landscape.

“There were soldiers and civilians everywhere. They piled the dead so high I had to look up,” said Crimbchin.

Between Dec. 31, 1950, and Jan. 7, 1951, 500,000 people including Crimbchin and her employer evacuated Seoul.

She said she walked 100 miles in minus 20-degree weather with a 7-year-old child on her back.

They were without food or water, poorly dressed for the bitter winter cold and reduced to begging for food and sleeping in abandoned houses. Finally, her employer turned Crimbchin out to fend for herself.

She eventually met her future husband, Frank Crimbchin, who was a member of the Army’s 76th Engineer Construction Battalion.

“We fell in love, even though we didn’t communicate very well,” she said.

Pega Crimbchin said she stayed with a female Korean interpreter for the 76th Construction Battalion who burned the clothes she had worn for three months and deloused her hair.

When Fred Crimbchin shipped back to the United States in September 1952, she stayed in an orphanage where her future husband sent money to pay for her education.

After working through months of bureaucratic red tape, Fred Crimbchin returned, and the two were married Jan. 2, 1954, and left the country.

Schell said it took about a year to write the book.

The author said it was important not to let the conflict, which cost nearly 1 million Koreans and nearly 37,000 American soldiers their lives, fade into obscurity.

Schell said, “It’s been called the Forgotten War, but the soldiers that fought in it and the people that lived through it haven’t forgotten in their hearts.”

She was aided by her parents’ records.

“She was a peasant survivor. She put some of it on tape,” Schell said. “She put her story on tape 30 years ago, and finally we found these tapes telling her story.”

She said, “My father had written letters during the time when it was illegal to marry a Korean woman, to his congressman, to his buddies in Korea. After his death, we found a box of his letters.”

Schell said her mother was illiterate in Korean and English. Her father showed her mother a box of what he called important papers. Her mother never opened it. When her father died in February 2012, she opened the box.

“There were normal letters to his parents. He had to leave her there in 1953. There were letters to his buddies still in Korea and letters back to him,” said Schell.

Together, mother and daughter are telling Crimbchin’s story to veterans groups, women’s clubs and churches.

Schell said 10 percent of the proceeds from sales of her book and 100 percent of the freewill donations from presentations she and her mother make are sent to Women of the Wells, a nonprofit that drills wells in water-impoverished countries.

Five wells have been paid for so far, Schell said, two in Nigeria, one in Laos, one in Liberia and one in Cambodia.