Escape from Camp 14 Page 7
Soon, blood was oozing down his legs, soaking the pants of his school uniform.
Shin dared not complain. His teacher had warned him that he would need to work harder than his classmates to wash away the sins of his mother and brother.
At school and during field work, all students had to ask permission to urinate or defecate. When Shin made his first bathroom request after his release from prison, his teacher said no. Shin tried to hold it during the school day, but ended up peeing his pants a couple of times a week, usually when he and other students were working outside. Since it was winter and very cold, he worked in pants stiff with urine.
Shin had known most of his classmates since they were seven years old and started primary school together. He was smaller than most of the boys in his class, but they had usually treated him as a peer. Now, taking their cue from the teacher, they began to taunt and bully him.
They snatched away his food, punched him in the stomach and called him names. Almost all the names were elaborations on ‘reactionary son of a bitch’.
Shin is not certain if his classmates knew he had betrayed his mother and brother. He believes that his childhood friend, Hong, did not tell anyone. In any case, Shin was never teased for having betrayed his family. That would have been an unpatriotic and risky schoolyard taunt, since all students were under orders from teachers and guards to inform on their families and on each other.
Before his time in prison, Shin had managed to make a strategic classroom alliance. He had become friends with Hong Joo Hyun, the grade leader. (This was the job Shin had tried to win on the night he snitched on his family.) Hong led students on work details and was authorized by the teacher to hit and kick classmates he regarded as shirkers. He was also the teacher’s most trusted informer.
Hong himself could be beaten or denied meals if the class dithered during field work and failed to meet quotas. His position was similar to adult prisoners known as jagubbanjang, or crew managers. Guards gave these managers, who were always male and tended to be physically imposing, virtually unchecked authority over their fellow prisoners. Since the managers had to answer for any failures by their crews, they were often more vigilant, brutal and unforgiving than camp guards.
After Shin’s mother and brother were executed, Hong began to watch Shin carefully. During a road repair assignment, he noticed that Shin had loaded far too many stones in a handcart. Shin tried again and again to push the cart, but it was too heavy for the emaciated boy to budge.
When Shin saw his grade leader approaching with a shovel, he initially expected some help. He thought that Hong would order other students to pitch in and roll the cart. Instead, Hong swung his shovel and struck Shin in the back, knocking him to the ground.
‘Pull your handcart correctly,’ Hong said.
He kicked Shin in the side of the head and told him to stand up. As Shin struggled to get to his feet, Hong again swung his shovel and mashed Shin’s nose, which began to bleed.
After that beating, students who were younger and smaller than Shin began to insult his mother. With the encouragement of the teacher, they called him names and punched him.
Owing to his confinement in the underground cell, Shin had lost much of his strength and nearly all of his endurance. His return to hard labour, long hours and skimpy meals at school made him almost insanely hungry.
In the school cafeteria, he scrounged constantly for spilled cabbage soup, dipping his hand in cold dirty soup that had spilled on the floor and licking his fingers clean. He searched floors, roads and fields for grains of rice, beans, or cow dung that contained undigested kernels of corn.
On a morning work detail in December, a couple of weeks after his return to school, Shin discovered a dried-up ear of corn in a pile of straw and devoured it. Hong Joo Hyun was nearby. He ran over to Shin, grabbed him by the hair, and dragged him to their nearby teacher.
‘Teacher, instead of working, Shin is just scavenging for food.’
As Shin fell to his knees to beg for forgiveness (a ritual abasement that he performed as a matter of instinct), his teacher hit him on the head with his walking stick and shouted for the rest of the class to help punish the scavenger.
‘Come here and slap him,’ the teacher said.
Shin knew what was coming. He had slapped and punched many of his classmates in a round-robin of collective punishment. Students queued up in front of Shin. Girls slapped him on the right cheek, boys on the left. Shin believes they went through five rotations before the teacher said it was time for lunch.
Before his confinement in the secret prison and before his teacher and schoolmates began picking on him, Shin hadn’t thought to blame anyone for his birth inside Camp 14.
His blinkered existence kept him focused on finding food and avoiding beatings. He was indifferent to the outside world, to his parents and to the history of his family. As much as he believed in anything, he believed the guards’ preaching about original sin. As the offspring of traitors, his one chance at redemption – and his only way of averting starvation – was hard work.
Back at school, however, he bristled with resentment. He was not yet hobbled by guilt about his mother and brother – that would come much later – but his months in the cell with Uncle had lifted, if only slightly, a curtain on the world beyond the fence.
Shin had become conscious of what he could never eat or see. The filth, stink and bleakness of the camp crushed his spirit. As he became marginally self-aware, he discovered loneliness, regret and longing.
Most of all, he was angry with both his parents. His mother’s scheming, he believed, had triggered his torture. He blamed her, too, for the abuse and humiliation dished out by his teacher and classmates. He despised both his mother and father for selfishly breeding in a labour camp, for producing offspring doomed to die behind barbed wire.
Out on the execution grounds, in the moments after Shin’s mother and brother were killed, Shin’s father had tried to comfort the boy.
‘You OK? Are you hurt anywhere? Did you see your mother in there?’ his father asked repeatedly, referring to the underground prison.
Shin was too angry to reply.
After the execution, he even found it distasteful to say the word ‘father’. On his rare days off from school – about fourteen days a year – Shin was expected to go and see his father. During the visits, Shin would often refuse to speak.
His father tried to apologize.
‘I know you’re suffering because you have the wrong parents,’ he told Shin. ‘You were unlucky to be born to us. What can you do? Things just turned out this way.’
Suicide is a powerful temptation for North Koreans plucked out of ordinary lives and subjected to the labour camps’ regime of hard labour, hunger, beatings and sleep deprivation.
‘Suicide was not uncommon in the camp,’ Kang Cholhwan wrote in his memoir about the decade he spent inside Camp 15. ‘A number of our neighbours took that road . . . They usually left behind letters criticizing the regime, or at the very least its Security Force . . . Truth be told, some form of punishment would await the family regardless of whether or not a critical note were left behind. It was a rule that admitted no exceptions. The Party saw suicide as an attempt to escape its grasp, and if the individual who had tried the trick wasn’t around to pay for it, someone else needed to be found.’1
North Korea’s National Security Agency warns all prisoners that suicide will be punished with longer sentences for surviving relatives, according to the Korean Bar Association in Seoul.
In his memoir about the six years he spent in two of the camps, Kim Yong, a former lieutenant colonel in the North Korean army, says the appeal of suicide was ‘overwhelming’.
‘Prisoners were beyond the point of feeling hungry, so they felt constantly delirious,’ wrote Kim, who said he spent two years at Camp 14 until he was transferred across the Taedong River to Camp 18, a political prison where guards were less brutal and prisoners had slightly more freedom.
&n
bsp; Trying to end the delirium he felt in Camp 14, Kim said he jumped down a coal-mine shaft. After tumbling to the bottom of the mine, badly injured, he felt more disappointment than pain: ‘I regretted that I could not find a better way to really put an end to this indescribable torment.’2
As wretched as Shin’s life became after the execution of his mother and brother, suicide for him was never more than a passing thought.
There was a fundamental difference, in his view, between prisoners who arrived from the outside and those who were born in the camp: many outsiders, shattered by the contrast between a comfortable past and a punishing present, could not find or maintain the will to survive. A perverse benefit of birth in the camp was a complete absence of expectations.
And so Shin’s misery never skidded into complete hopelessness. He had no hope to lose, no past to mourn, no pride to defend. He did not find it degrading to lick soup off the floor. He was not ashamed to beg a guard for forgiveness. It didn’t trouble his conscience to betray a friend for food. These were merely survival skills, not motives for suicide.
Teachers at Shin’s school rarely rotated to other jobs. In the seven years since he’d entered school, he had known only two teachers. But four months after the execution, Shin had a break. One morning, the teacher who tormented him – and who encouraged his classmates to do likewise – was gone.
His replacement gave no outward indications that he would be any less abusive. Like nearly every guard in the camp, he was a nameless, bullish-looking man in his early thirties who demanded that students avert their eyes and bow their heads when they spoke to him. Shin remembers him being just as cold, distant and domineering as the others.
The new teacher, though, did not seem to want Shin to die of malnutrition.
By March 1997, about four months after his release from the underground prison, starvation had become a real possibility for Shin. Harassed by his teacher and fellow students, he could not find enough nourishment to maintain his weight. He also could not seem to recover from his burns. His scars still bled. He grew weaker and often failed to complete his work assignments, which led to more beatings, less food, more bleeding.
The new teacher took Shin to the cafeteria after mealtimes, where he told the boy to eat whatever leftovers he could find. He sometimes sneaked food to Shin. He also assigned him less arduous work and made certain that Shin had a warm place to sleep on the floor of the student dormitory.
Just as importantly, the new teacher prevented Shin’s classmates from hitting him and stealing his food. The taunting about his dead mother ended. Hong Joo Hyun, the class leader who had struck him in the face with a shovel, became his friend again. Shin put on some weight. The burns on his back finally healed.
Perhaps the teacher felt pity for a picked-on child who had watched his mother die. It is also possible that senior guards in the camp had found out that a disgruntled teacher was mistreating a reliable snitch. Perhaps the replacement teacher was ordered to keep the boy alive.
Why the new teacher made the effort, Shin never knew. But Shin is certain that without his help he would have died.
10
Tractors hauled food to the work site every day. There were heaps of milled corn and steaming vats of cabbage soup.
Shin was fifteen and working alongside thousands of prisoners. It was 1998 and they were building a hydroelectric dam on the Taedong River, which forms the southern border of Camp 14. The project was urgent enough to warrant filling the stomachs of slave labourers three times a day. Guards also allowed workers – about five thousand adult prisoners and a couple of hundred students from the camp’s secondary school – to catch fish and frogs from the river.
For the first time in his life, Shin ate well for an entire year.
The North Korean government had decided that the camp, with its high-voltage fence and factories that churned out military uniforms, glassware and cement, needed a reliable local source of electricity, and fast.
‘Hey! Hey! Hey! It’s falling! Falling!’
Shin shouted the warning. He was hauling platters of wet concrete to the crew when he noticed that a freshly poured concrete wall had cracked and was beginning to collapse. Beneath it, a crew of eight was finishing another wall.
He screamed as loudly as he could. But it was too late.
All the workers – three adults, along with three fifteen-year-old girls and two fifteen-year-old boys – were killed. Several were crushed beyond recognition. The supervising guard did not halt work after the accident. At the end of the shift, he simply ordered Shin and other workers to dispose of the bodies.
The mountains of North Korea are crisscrossed with swift rivers, large and small. Their hydropower potential is such that ninety per cent of the electricity on the Korean Peninsula prior to partition came from the North.1
But under the Kim family dynasty, the North Korean government has failed to build or maintain a reliable national electricity grid linked to hydroelectric dams, many of which are located in remote areas. When the Soviet Union stopped supplying cheap fuel oil in the early 1990s, city-based, oil-powered generators sputtered to a halt and the lights went out across much of the country. Most of the time, they are still out.
Satellite photographs of the Korean Peninsula at night show a black hole between China and South Korea. There is not enough power in the country even to keep the lights on in Pyongyang, where the government tries to pamper the elite. In February 2008, when I travelled for three days and two nights to Pyongyang as part of a large delegation of foreign journalists to cover a performance by the New York Philharmonic, the government managed to turn on the lights in much of the city. When the orchestra and the press left town, the lights went out again.
It makes sense, then, that the construction of small- and medium-sized hydroelectric plants, capable of serving local industry and built mostly by hand, using basic technology, has been a priority since the 1990s. In a frenzy of hard labour, thousands have been built.
Besides staving off economic collapse, the dams are ideologically beguiling to the family that runs the country. As his hagiographers tell the story, Kim Il Sung’s most important intellectual achievement – his brilliant juche idea – asserts that national pride goes hand in glove with self-reliance.
As the Great Leader explained it:
‘Establishing juche means, in a nutshell, being the master of revolution and reconstruction in one’s own country. This means holding fast to an independent position, rejecting dependence on others, using one’s own brains, believing in one’s own strength, displaying the revolutionary spirit of self-reliance, and thus solving one’s own problems for oneself on one’s own responsibility under all circumstances.’2
None of this, of course, is even remotely possible in a country as ill-governed as North Korea. It has always depended on handouts from foreign governments, and if these end, the Kim dynasty would probably collapse. Even in the best of years, it cannot feed itself. North Korea has no oil, and its economy has never been able to generate enough cash to buy sufficient fuel or food on the world market.
North Korea would have lost the Korean War and disappeared as a state without the help of the Chinese, who fought the United States and other Western forces to a stalemate. Until the 1990s, North Korea’s economy was largely held together by subsidies from the Soviet Union. From 2000 to 2008, South Korea propped up the North – and bought itself a measure of peaceful coexistence – with huge unconditional gifts of fertilizer and food, along with generous investment.
Since then, Pyongyang has become increasingly dependent on China for concessional trade, food aid and fuel. A telling measure of China’s growing influence is that in the months prior to Kim Jong Eun’s official emergence in 2010 as the chosen successor to Kim Jong Il, the ailing elder Kim travelled twice to Beijing, where diplomats say he asked for China to bless his succession plan.
Reality notwithstanding, North Korea champions self-reliance as the sine qua non of the country’s much-a
dvertised goal of becoming ‘a great, prosperous and powerful nation’ by 2012, the one-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Kim Il Sung.
To that fantastical end, the government regularly enlists the masses in miserable tasks dressed up in noble slogans. The propaganda can be quite creative: the famine was repackaged as the ‘Arduous March’, a patriotic struggle that North Koreans were encouraged to win with the inspiring slogan: ‘Let’s Eat Two Meals Per Day’.
In the spring of 2010, as food shortages again became severe, the government launched a massive back-to-the-farm campaign to persuade city dwellers to move to the countryside and raise crops. These urbanites were to be permanent reinforcements for ‘rice-planting combat’, the annual campaign that sends office workers, students and soldiers to the country-side for two months in the spring and two weeks in the fall. In the winter, city people are charged with collecting their faeces – and that of their neighbours – for spring planting.
Other urgent and patriotic tasks that North Koreans have been urged to shoulder include ‘Let’s Breed More High-Yielding Fish!’ ‘Let’s Expand Goat Rearing and Create More Grassland in Accordance with the Party!’ and ‘Let’s Grow More Sunflowers!’ The success of these hortatory campaigns has been mixed, at best, especially when it comes to the government’s highly unpopular efforts to lure city-bred people into back-breaking farm labour.
For the dam project inside Camp 14 there were no such problems with motivation.
As Shin witnessed it, soon after the guards announced a new ‘rally of endeavour’ to build a hydroelectric dam, thousands of adult prisoners marched from factories to makeshift dormitories erected near the north bank of the Taedong. Shin and his classmates moved out of their school dormitory. They all worked, ate and slept at the dam site, which was located about six miles southeast of the centre of the camp.
Labour on the dam, which satellite photographs show to be a substantial concrete structure spanning a wide river, with turbines and spillways hugging the northern bank, continued round the clock. Trucks hauled in cement, sand and rock. Shin saw only one diesel-powered excavator. Most of the digging and construction was done by workers using shovels, buckets and bare hands.