"I had been so afraid that my husband might have been dead," Hong told reporters through an interpreter after meeting South Korean Red Cross chief Han Wan-Sang.

"But I have been able to find out that he is still alive, and where he lives. It's so fortunate," she said, adding she received the information in February.

Hong met her husband, Hong Ok-Geun, in 1955. Both were chemistry students at the University of Jena in former East Germany. The couple married in 1960, but one year later, the husband was ordered to return to North Korea.

"I hope that the Red Cross authorities were also able to deliver the news to (my husband in) North Korea that his family still lives in Germany," she said.

Gaining political support?

The leaders of the two Koreas were expected to meet next week

Hong is planning to appeal to South Korean President Roo Moo-Hyun for help. Roo was scheduled to meet the North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il next week, but their summit was postponed until October because of severe floods in the communist country.

The South Korean Red Cross chief hopes that the couple will be reunited after almost half a century.

"You are an eyewitness who testifies that love can continue, transcending culture, race and everything," Han said.

The time of her life

At the time Renate Hong's husband was asked to return to his homeland, their first son was 10 months old and she was pregnant with a second child.

North Korea is still a heavily militarized country run by the communist elite

"We had just about enough time to buy some books and pack his clothes," Hong told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung last year.

The couple exchanged more than 50 letters in the first two years of separation. But then, all of a sudden, the letters from Korea stopped coming. Renate Hong kept writing, but her letters got returned.

Her appeals to the North Korean embassy went unanswered, while the foreign ministry of the German Democratic Republic turned down her application for an exit visa and told her that there was nothing that could be done to help bring her husband back to Germany.

As time passed, Hong gave up hope of ever seeing her husband again. She even had her marriage officially annulled 18 years ago, but she kept her husband's last name.

"The name reminds me of the best time of my life," Hong told Berlin's Der Tagesspiegel newspaper earlier this year.