[I have studied North Korea and its history, but I do not study it professionally].

Certainly there are. Keep in mind that if you were 15 years old in 1945, when the war ended and Korea was divided, you could still credibly be alive today: you would be turning 84.

One book I really recommend on this general topic is Barbara Demick's (Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea)[http://www.amazon.com/Nothing-Envy-Ordinary-Lives-North/dp/0385523912], which mostly uses the personal stories of defectors to give an everyday-person perspective on what it's like to grow up there.

If what you are getting at is the idea that there would have been a lot of people in North Korea in the late 20th century secretly sharing their memory of a better, freer national past, there are a number of things you would have to keep in mind.

Firstly, the whole peninsula was occupied by Japan for decades before the Second World War. Korean cultural practices (including language) and leadership movements were suppressed, and the economy was exploited. You may already be aware that part of Kim Il Sung's mythology is as a liberator from the occupation: there really was no "normal, and then the Kims".

Secondly, North Korea actually experienced significant economic growth in the early post-Korean-War years. There were very substantial material gains for the population in the 1950s and 1960s. So again, in terms of "what life was like" in many respects, even a middle-aged person in North Korea in the 1970s would not have remembered a time of normal, peaceful industrial production and progress that had somehow been interrupted by the ascent of the Kim Dynasty.

Thirdly, while there had been some limited agitation for democracy at some points in Korea's modern past, very few Koreans would have had much real experience with functioning liberal societies. And throughout the Kims' rule, concerted propaganda efforts have been carried out to convince the population that people in other countries live miserably under the yoke of colonialist oppression (something that older Koreans would have known all about). That continues to this day, although it has become much harder since the 1990s to keep signs of outside prosperity away from ordinary people. So again, on the assumption that your question is getting at whether there have been a lot of people in North Korea who could really conceive first hand of an alternative, valid, Kim-less polity, there probably have not been a ton.

Fourthly, North Korean society developed into an extreme apparatus of self-surveillance that reached all the way down into every building in every village. Even to the extent that you remember a time that at least provides fodder for considering alternatives to the regime, you would have been taking a serious risk each time you talked about it with anyone, wrote down history or thoughts that deviated from Party orthodoxy, or tried to compare notes with others of your generation to test the past you can reconstruct from childhood against the official version. So it seems unlikely that there is an underground body of work produced by aging North Koreans that speaks to how they relate their individual perspectives of the pre-War past to how their society looks today.

Here are a few additional memoirs, though they are more contemporary than you're looking for.

EDIT: One person who might partly fit the demographic perspective you're looking for is Sung Hae Rang ; I don't know if her memoir is available in English, though.