Escape from Camp 14 Read online

  For North Koreans who remain in the camps

  The cult of personality surrounding the Kim family began with the Great Leader, Kim Il Sung, who was depicted in government propaganda as a loving father to his people. Although his leadership was brutal, his death in 1994 was deeply mourned.

  (Photo of painting by Blaine Harden)

  ‘There is no “human rights issue” in this country, as everyone leads the most dignified and happy life.’

  [North] Korean Central News Agency, 6 March 2009

  Preface

  His first memory is an execution.

  He walked with his mother to a wheat field near the Taedong River, where guards had rounded up several thousand prisoners. Excited by the crowd, the boy crawled between adult legs to the front row, where he saw guards tying a man to a wooden pole.

  Shin In Geun was four years old, too young to understand the speech that came before that killing. At dozens of executions in years to come, he would listen to a supervising guard telling the crowd that the prisoner about to die had been offered ‘redemption’ through hard labour, but had rejected the generosity of the North Korean government. To prevent the prisoner from cursing the state that was about to take his life, guards stuffed pebbles into his mouth then covered his head with a hood.

  At that first execution, Shin watched three guards take aim. Each fired three times. The reports of their rifles terrified the boy and he fell over backwards. But he scrambled to his feet in time to see guards untie a slack, blood-spattered body, wrap it in a blanket and heave it into a cart.

  In Camp 14, a prison for the political enemies of North Korea, assemblies of more than two inmates were forbidden, except for executions. Everyone had to attend them. The labour camp used a public killing, and the fear it generated, as a teachable moment.

  Shin’s guards in the camp were his teachers – and his breeders. They had selected his mother and father. They taught him that prisoners who break camp rules deserve death. On a hillside near his school, a slogan was posted: ‘All according to the rules and regulations’. The boy memorized the camp’s ten rules, ‘The Ten Commandments’, as he later called them, and can still recite them by heart. The first one stated: ‘Anyone caught escaping will be shot immediately’.

  Ten years after that first execution, Shin returned to the same field. Again, guards had rounded up a big crowd. Again, a wooden pole had been pounded into the ground. A makeshift gallows had also been built.

  Shin arrived this time in the backseat of a car driven by a guard. He wore handcuffs and a blindfold fashioned from a rag. His father, also handcuffed and blindfolded, sat beside him in the car.

  They had been released after eight months in an underground prison inside Camp 14. As a condition of their release, they had signed documents promising never to discuss what had happened to them underground.

  In that prison within a prison, guards tried to torture a confession out of Shin and his father. They wanted to know about the failed escape of Shin’s mother and only brother. Guards stripped Shin, tied ropes to his ankles and wrists, and suspended him from a hook in the ceiling. They lowered him over a fire. He passed out when his flesh began to burn.

  But he confessed nothing. He had nothing to confess. He had not conspired with his mother and brother to escape. He believed what the guards had taught him since his birth inside the camp: he could never escape and he must inform on anyone who talked about trying. Not even in his dreams had Shin fantasized about life on the outside.

  The guards never taught him what every North Korean schoolboy learns: Americans are ‘bastards’ scheming to invade and humiliate the homeland. South Korea is the ‘bitch’ of its American master. North Korea is a great country whose brave and brilliant leaders are the envy of the world. Indeed, he knew nothing of the existence of South Korea, China, or the United States.

  Unlike his countrymen, he did not grow up with the ubiquitous photograph of his Dear Leader, as Kim Jong Il was called. Nor had he seen photographs or statues of Kim’s father, Kim Il Sung, the Great Leader who founded North Korea and who remains the country’s Eternal President, despite his death in 1994.

  When a guard removed his blindfold and he saw the crowd, the wooden pole and the gallows, Shin believed he was about to be executed.

  No pebbles, though, were forced into his mouth. His handcuffs were removed. A guard led him to the front of the crowd. He and his father would be spectators.

  Guards dragged a middle-aged woman to the gallows and tied a young man to the wooden pole. They were Shin’s mother and his older brother.

  A guard tightened a noose around his mother’s neck. She tried to catch Shin’s eye. He looked away. After she stopped twitching at the end of the rope, Shin’s brother was shot by three guards. Each fired three times.

  As he watched them die, Shin was relieved it was not him. He was angry with his mother and brother for planning an escape. Although he would not admit it to anyone for fifteen years, he knew he was responsible for their executions.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  PART ONE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  PART TWO

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  PART THREE

  21

  22

  23

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  APPENDICES

  The Ten Laws of Camp 14

  Sketches from Shin’s Life in Camp 14

  Introduction

  Nine years after his mother’s hanging, Shin squirmed through an electric fence and ran off through the snow. It was 2 January 2005. Before then, no one born in a North Korean political prison camp had ever escaped. As far as can be determined, Shin is still the only one to do so.

  He was twenty-three years old and knew no one outside the fence.

  Within a month, he had walked into China. Within two years, he was living in South Korea. Four years later, he was living in southern California and was a senior ambassador at Liberty in North Korea (LiNK), an American human rights group.

  His name is now Shin Dong-hyuk. He changed it after arriving in South Korea in an attempt to reinvent himself as a free man. He is handsome, with quick, wary eyes. A Los Angeles dentist has done work on his teeth, which he could not brush in the camp. His overall physical health is excellent. His body, though, is a roadmap of the hardships of growing up in a labour camp that the North Korean government insists does not exist.

  Stunted by malnutrition, he is short and slight – five feet six inches and about one hundred and twenty pounds. His arms are bowed from childhood labour. His lower back and buttocks are scarred with burns from the torturer’s fire. The skin over his pubis bears a puncture scar from the hook used to hold him in place over the fire. His ankles are scarred by shackles, from which he was hung upside down in solitary confinement. His right middle finger is cut off at the first knuckle, a guard’s punishment for dropping a sewing machine in a camp garment factory. His shins, from ankle to knee on both legs, are mutilated and scarred by burns from the electrified barbed-wire fence that failed to keep him inside Camp 14.

  Shin is roughly the same age as Kim Jong Eun, the chubby third son of Kim Jong Il who took over as leader after his father’s death in 2011. As contemporaries, Shin and Kim Jong Eun personify the antipodes of privilege and privation in North Korea, a nominally classless society where, in fact, breeding and bloodlines decide
everything.

  Kim Jong Eun was born a communist prince and raised behind palace walls. He was educated under an assumed name in Switzerland and returned to North Korea to study in an elite university named after his grandfather. Because of his parentage, he lives above the law. For him, everything is possible. In 2010, he was named a four-star general in the Korean People’s Army despite a total lack of field experience in the military. A year later, after his father died of a sudden heart attack, state media in North Korea described him as ‘another leader sent from heaven’. He may, however, be forced to share his earthly dictatorship with older relatives and military leaders.

  Shin was born a slave and raised behind a high-voltage barbed-wire fence. He was educated in a camp school to read and count at a rudimentary level. Because his blood was tainted by the perceived crimes of his father’s brothers, he lived below the law. For him, nothing was possible. His state-prescribed career trajectory was hard labour and an early death from disease brought on by chronic hunger – all without a charge or a trial or an appeal, and all in secrecy.

  In stories of concentration camp survival, there is a conventional narrative arc. Security forces steal the protagonist away from a loving family and a comfortable home. To survive, he abandons moral principles, suppresses feelings for others and ceases to be a civilized human being.

  In perhaps the most celebrated of these stories, Night, by Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel, the thirteen-year-old narrator explains his torment with an account of the normal life that existed before he and his family were packed aboard trains bound for Nazi death camps. Wiesel studied the Talmud daily. His father owned a store and watched over their village in Romania. His grandfather was always present to celebrate the Jewish holidays. But after the boy’s entire family perished in the camps, Wiesel was left ‘alone, terribly alone in a world without God, without man. Without love or mercy.’

  Shin’s story of survival is different.

  His mother beat him and his father, who was allowed by guards to sleep with his mother just five nights a year, ignored him. His brother was a stranger. Children in the camp were untrustworthy and abusive. Before he learned anything else, Shin learned to survive by snitching on all of them.

  Love and mercy and family were words without meaning. God did not disappear or die. Shin had never heard of him.

  In a preface to Night, Wiesel wrote that an adolescent’s knowledge of death and evil ‘should be limited to what one discovers in literature’.

  In Camp 14, Shin did not know literature existed. He saw only one book in the camp, a Korean grammar text, in the hands of a teacher who wore a guard’s uniform, carried a revolver on his hip and beat one of his primary school classmates to death with a chalkboard pointer.

  Unlike those who have survived a concentration camp, Shin had not been torn away from a civilized existence and forced to descend into hell. He was born and raised there. He accepted its values. He called it home.

  North Korea’s labour camps have now existed for twice as long as the Soviet Gulag and about twelve times longer than the Nazi concentration camps. There is no dispute about where these camps are. High-resolution satellite photographs, accessible on Google Earth to anyone with an Internet connection, show vast fenced compounds sprawling through the rugged mountains of North Korea.

  The South Korean government estimates that there are about one hundred and fifty-four thousand prisoners in the camps, while the US State Department and several human rights groups have put the number as high as two hundred thousand. After examining a decade of satellite images of the camps, Amnesty International noticed new construction inside the camps in 2011 and became concerned that the inmate population was increasing, perhaps to short-circuit possible unrest as power began to shift from Kim Jong Il to his young and untried son.1

  There are six camps, according to South Korea’s intelligence agency and human rights groups. The biggest is thirty-one miles long and twenty-five miles wide, an area larger than the city of Los Angeles. Electrified, barbed-wire fences – reinforced by guard towers and patrolled by armed men – encircle most of the camps. Two of them, numbers 15 and 18, have re-education zones where some fortunate detainees receive remedial instruction in the teachings of Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung. If prisoners memorize enough of these teachings and convince guards they are loyal, they can be released, but they are monitored for the rest of their lives by state security. The remaining camps are ‘complete control districts’ where prisoners, who are called ‘irredeemables’,2 are worked to death.

  Shin’s camp, number 14, is a complete control district. By reputation it is the toughest of them all because of its particularly brutal working conditions, the vigilance of its guards and the state’s unforgiving view of the seriousness of the crimes committed by its inmates, many of whom are purged officials from the ruling party, the government and the military, along with their families. Established around 1959 in central North Korea – near Kaechon County in South Pyongan Province – Camp 14 holds an estimated fifteen thousand prisoners. About thirty miles long and fifteen miles wide, it has farms, mines and factories threaded through steep mountain valleys.

  Although Shin is the only person born in a labour camp to escape and tell his story, there are at least twenty-six other labour camp eyewitnesses who are now in the free world.3 They include at least fifteen North Koreans who were imprisoned in Camp 15’s edification district, and who won their release and later turned up in South Korea. Former guards from other camps have also found their way to South Korea. Kim Yong, a former North Korean lieutenant colonel from a privileged background in Pyongyang, spent six years in two camps before escaping in a coal train.

  A distillation of their testimony by the Korean Bar Association in Seoul paints a detailed picture of daily life in the camps. A few prisoners are publicly executed every year. Others are beaten to death or secretly murdered by guards, who have almost complete license to abuse and rape prisoners. Most prisoners tend crops, mine coal, sew military uniforms, or make cement while subsisting on a near-starvation diet of corn, cabbage and salt. They lose their teeth, their gums turn black, their bones weaken and, as they enter their forties, they hunch over at the waist. Issued a set of clothes once or twice a year, they commonly work and sleep in filthy rags, living without soap, socks, gloves, underclothes, or toilet paper. Twelve- to fifteen-hour workdays are mandatory until prisoners die, usually of malnutrition-related illnesses, before they turn fifty.4 Although precise numbers are impossible to obtain, Western governments and human rights groups estimate that hundreds of thousands of people have perished in these camps.

  Most North Koreans are sent to the camps without any judicial process, and many die there without learning the charges against them. They are taken from their homes, usually at night, by the Bowibu, the National Security Agency. Guilt by association is legal in North Korea. A wrongdoer is often imprisoned with his parents and children. Kim Il Sung laid down the law in 1972: ‘[E]nemies of class, whoever they are, their seed must be eliminated through three generations.’

  My first encounter with Shin was at lunch in the winter of 2008. We met in a Korean restaurant in downtown Seoul. Talkative and hungry, he wolfed down several helpings of rice and beef. As he ate, he told my translator and me what it was like to watch as his mother was hanged. He blamed her for his torture in the camp, and he went out of his way to say that he was still furious with her. He said he had not been a ‘good son’, but would not explain why.

  During his years in the camp he said he had never once heard the word ‘love’, certainly not from his mother, a woman he continued to despise, even in death. He had heard about the concept of forgiveness in a South Korean church, but it confused him. To ask for forgiveness in Camp 14, he said, was ‘to beg not to be punished’.

  He had written a memoir about the camp, but it had received little attention in South Korea. He was jobless, broke, behind on his rent and uncertain what to do next. The rules of Camp 14 had prevented him
, on pain of execution, from having intimate contact with a woman. He now wanted to find a proper girlfriend, but said he didn’t know how to begin looking for one.

  After lunch, he took me to the small, sad apartment in Seoul that he could not afford. Although he would not look me in the eye, he showed me his chopped-off finger and his scarred back. He allowed me to take his photograph. Despite all the hardship he had endured he still had a baby face. He was twenty-six years old – three years out of Camp 14.

  I was fifty-six years old at that memorable lunch. As a correspondent for the Washington Post in Northeast Asia, I had been searching for more than a year for a story that could explain how North Korea used repression to keep from falling apart.

  Political implosion had become my specialty. For the Post and for the New York Times, I spent nearly three decades covering failed states in Africa, the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the breakup of Yugoslavia and the slow-motion rot in Burma under the generals. From the outside looking in, North Korea seemed ripe – indeed, overripe – for the kind of collapse I had witnessed elsewhere. In a part of the world where nearly everyone else was getting rich, its people were increasingly isolated, poor and hungry.

  Still, the Kim family dynasty kept the lid on. Totalitarian repression preserved their basket-case state.

  The problem with showing how they did it was lack of access. Elsewhere in the world, repressive states are not always successful in sealing their borders. I had been able to work openly in Mengistu’s Ethiopia, Mobutu’s Congo and Milosevic’s Serbia, and had slipped in as a tourist to write about Burma.

  North Korea was much more careful. Foreign reporters, especially Americans, were rarely allowed inside. I visited North Korea only once, saw what my minders wanted me to see and learned little. If journalists entered illegally, they risked months or years of imprisonment as spies. To win release, they sometimes needed the help of a former American president.5