The 1986 Brothers Home incident, believed to be the inspiration for Squid Game, was a South Korean camp in Busan funded by the Korean government. There, people were tortured into playing children’s games where losing meant losing one’s own life.

Why People Were Brought Into Brothers’ Home:

According to the Asia-Pacific Journal. Brothers Home was initially constructed to be an orphanage in 1960, but due to the high number of pickpockets and unhoused people on the streets, Brothers Home became a facility to house “vagrants” in the 1970s. “Vagrants” became a term used by the South Korean government to justify bringing people into the facility. With additional donations from the Rothschild family, the government gave bonuses to police officials who agreed to take people into Brothers Home. Those unhoused drank in public, were seen loitering, littering, or looked “unkept” (such as an overgrown beard) and were picked up in a windowless van and dropped off at Brother’s Home.

The “VIPs”:

Imagine it’s 1972, and you’ve received an invitation to the Surrealist Ball from the one and only Rothchild family, one of the world’s wealthiest and most influential families. The invitation can only be read when reflected against a mirror; the letter reads, “Black Tie, Long Dresses, And Surrealist Heads.”

Those invited to the Surrealist Ball in France were greeted by the staff (dressed as cats) and led into a maze upon entry; according to All That’s Interesting, “If you got lost, you could call a cat to ‘help’ you.” Inside the mansion, the staff would ly around, purring and pawing at each other, “Plates were covered in fur, tables decorated with taxidermied tortoises and food served on a mannequin corpse on a bed of roses.’”

The Surrealist Ball is believed to have inspired the “VIPs,” who can be seen wearing similar style marks in the Show. The staff also wear costumes, act like animals, and entertain the guests. Nedisons believe this event is linked to the VIPs in Squid Games because the Rothschild family and the Korean Government are responsible for funding the Brothers Home establishment.

The following information was obtained from the ‘The Surviving Child’ by Han Jong-sun, a book written about what happened in Brothers’ Home by a survivor who was forced into confinement at 9 years old.

Entering Brothers Home:

Upon arrival, the victims were made to line up, and one by one, their hair would be messily shaved off, inflicting wounds on the heads of the victims. Next came the showers; they were stripped of their clothing and belongings. Multiple people at once were made to shower together. The water was left on for less than 30 seconds per group of victims. If someone didn’t shower fast enough, they were beaten, and if any of the victims were wounded, they were forced to scrub their open wounds with salt. Now, all the 3,500 victims, 1,00 being children, had left was a blue tracksuit with a number attached to the chest; they were forced to forget their names and go by their numbers, similarly to the characters in Squid Games.

BBC: Brothers’ Home: South Korea’s 1980s ‘concentration camp’ includes images from the book written by one of the survivors of Brothers Home; the photos show different aspects that the victims had to live through while trapped in Brothers Home.

For food, lunch was divided into groups; each group had approximately less than 3 minutes to line up and receive their food, Within the same time limit they had to sit down and quickly eat. If someone couldn’t finish their food in time, they were “punished”- kicked, punched, choked; many of the survivors lost their teeth due to these beatings. After the time was up for one group, the next group had to come and do the same thing. The food included rotten and/or moldy rice and fish; since the rice was never washed, it often contained bugs. The food sometimes consisted of a small bowl of soup, which was just cold water with oil and clumps of radishes.

Several victims were forced to sleep together in rooms. At night, the doors would be padlocked shut, and if they tried speaking to each other or made any noise, they would be punished by the platoon leaders by beating the entire room. The children had to sleep with one blanket and were forced to sleep through winter and summer nights; many of them died from the weather conditions. A military alarm rang every morning at 5:00 am. If the beds weren’t made after a morning headcount, those who didn’t make their beds would get “punished”.

“Games” At Brothers Home:

Similar to Squid Games, those at Brothers Home were forced to play “children’s games” while in confinement. All of these games resulted in people being “punished,” and sometimes the punishments meant receiving torture to the point of death.

1. One of these games was called “The Han River Bridge.” People were forced to face the front and line up, and they were instructed to lift their legs onto the shoulders of the people behind them and support their weight using their hands. Fifty people simultaneously formed the “bridge” as the guards took turns walking across. If a guard were to fall, everyone would get stomped on and beaten with wooden sticks.

2. In another “game,” the guards would yell “Hiroshima.” This signaled for the victims to stand upside down from their bunk beds, using their feet to hold themselves up from the top bunk. The guards would monitor them; if they fell, they would get punished, but if nobody moved, the guards would “get bored” and randomly start hitting people in the stomach to trigger them to fall.
3. Another is called “The Kimpbap Role.” For this game, people were rolled on a mat and got beaten. This was hardly a game, as the “players” had no way of defending themselves and would die on most occasions that they played this game.
4. In this game, one must balance their heads on their skulls and use their feet to keep themselves from falling. A variation of this game includes someone kneeling with their head on the ground. If you moved in either of these positions, the victim’s head and nose would be pushed into the gravel and inflict wounds on the skull.

1. In the game “Motor Vehicle.” Here, guards would yell out “right signal” and “left wheel” and hit the eyes, legs, mouths, and every individual part of the victim’s body and torture them.

Punishments to these Games included beatings, sexual assault, mental torture, and death. Han Jong-sun, author of ‘The Surviving Child’ is the primary reason we know these games occurred.

The End Of Brothers Home:

One day, two friends go hunting and see something strange in the distance of the woods. People in blue tracksuits carrying bags of cement with their ankles chained to one another. They find this peculiar but decide to retire for the day, but one of the hunters returns the next day with a camera and begins taking pictures. He decides he will find out what’s going on because he is Attorney Yongwon Kim, the newfound prosecutor for Ursan. Kim immediately got a search warrant for Brothers Home; inside, he found people with serious injuries and very malnourished. They found a safe with 8 million dollars that Brothers Home had been collecting, including donations they received as part of the “children’s orphanage.” After the search, Kim said he was “Confident that children were kidnapped and trapped in the facility”

A year later, Park In-guen, who ran Brothers Home, was arrested and forced to close the center. The “VIPs” or Rothschild family, who funded Brothers Home, were also arrested, but these people never received sentences long enough for their crimes, both getting out of jail early. Victims are still suffering from the memories of being tortured. According to Aljazeera, some of the victims who have been protesting since being released from confinement were recently able to get a re-investigation into the case of Brothers Home 30 years later, in which over 600 people died.