Escape from Camp 14 Read online

  Shin had seen prisoners die in the camp before – of hunger, illness, beatings and at public executions – but not as a routine part of work.

  The greatest loss of life at the dam occurred soon after fullscale construction began. A rainy season flash flood rolled down the Taedong in July 1998, sweeping away hundreds of dam workers and students. Shin watched them disappear from a perch on the riverbank where he was hauling sand. He was quickly put to work confirming the identities of dead students and burying their bodies.

  On the third day after the flood, he remembers carrying the bloated body of a girl on his back. At first it was slack, but it soon became stiff, with rigid arms and legs splayed outward. To squeeze the body into a narrow, hand-dug grave, he had to push the limbs together.

  Floodwaters stripped some drowned students of their clothes. When Hong Joo Hyun discovered a naked classmate amid the post-flood debris, he removed his own clothes and covered the body.

  As the clean-up continued, Shin competed with many other students to find bodies. For each corpse they buried, guards rewarded them with one or two servings of rice.

  The Taedong, as it flowed past Camp 14, was too wide and swift to freeze in the North Korean winter, allowing dam construction to continue year round. In December 1998, Shin was ordered to wade into the river’s shallows to pick up boulders. Unable to bear the cold and without the approval of his guard, he joined several other students who tried to wade out.

  ‘You come out of the water and I’ll starve you all, understand!’ their guard shouted.

  Shivering uncontrollably, Shin kept working.

  Students worked primarily as bottom-rung labourers. They often carried steel reinforcing rods to older workmen who tied them together with twine or wire as the dam rose from the riverbed in a chequerboard pattern of concrete blocks. None of the students had gloves, and in winter their hands often stuck to the cold rods. Handing over a ‘rebar’ sometimes meant ripping skin from one’s palms and fingers.

  Shin remembers that when one of his classmates, Byun Soon Ho, complained about a fever and feeling unwell, a guard gave him a lesson in the benefits of stoicism.

  ‘Soon Ho, stick out your tongue,’ the guard said.

  He ordered the boy to press his tongue to a freezing rebar. Nearly an hour later, Soon Ho, tears in his eyes, his mouth oozing blood, managed to detach his tongue.

  Working at the dam was dangerous, but Shin also found it exhilarating.

  The primary reason was food. It was not particularly tasty, but month in, month out there was lots of it. Shin remembers mealtimes at the dam site as the happiest moments of his teen years. He regained all the weight and stamina he had lost in the underground prison, he could keep up at work and he became confident in his ability to survive.

  Living near the dam also gave Shin a small measure of independence. In the summer, hundreds of students slept outdoors under a canopy. When they were not working, they could walk – during daylight hours – anywhere inside the sprawl of Camp 14. For his hard work, Shin earned a recommendation from his grade leader that allowed him to leave the dam site for four overnight visits to his father. Since they were not reconciled, Shin spent just one night with him.

  He had worked at the dam for about a year when his time at secondary school came to an end in May 1999. The school had been little more than slave quarters from which he was sent out as a rock picker, weed puller and dam labourer, but graduation meant that, at the age of sixteen, he had become an adult worker. He was ready to be assigned to a permanent job inside the camp.

  About sixty per cent of Shin’s class was assigned to the coal mines, where accidental death from cave-ins, explosions and gas poisonings was common. Many miners developed black lung disease after ten to fifteen years of working underground. Most miners died in their forties, if not before. As Shin understood it, an assignment in the mines was a death sentence.

  The decision about who went where was made by Shin’s teacher, the man who two years earlier had saved Shin’s life by providing him with extra food and halting abuse from his classmates. The teacher handed down assignments without explanation, curtly telling students where they would spend the rest of their lives. As soon as the teacher made his announcements, new masters – foremen from camp factories, mines and farms – came to the school and led the students away.

  The teacher told Hong Joo Hyun that he was going to the mines. Shin never saw him again.

  The girl who lost her big toe in the mines at the age of eleven, Moon Sung Sim, was assigned to the textile factory.

  Hong Sung Jo, the friend who saved Shin from his torturers by confirming that he’d informed on his mother and brother, was also sent to the mines. Shin never saw him again, either.

  If there was a rationale behind the assignments, Shin never understood it. He thinks it came down to the personal whim of the teacher, who was consistently unreadable. Perhaps the teacher liked Shin. Perhaps he pitied him. Maybe he had been ordered to look out for the boy. Shin just doesn’t know.

  In any case, the teacher again saved his life. He assigned him to a permanent job at Camp 14’s pig farm, where two hundred men and women raised about eight hundred pigs, along with goats, rabbits, chickens and a few cows. Feed for the animals was grown in fields surrounding the livestock pens.

  ‘Shin In Geun, you’re assigned to the ranch,’ the teacher told him. ‘Work hard.’

  Nowhere else in Camp 14 was there so much food to steal.

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  Shin did not work hard.

  The foremen would sometimes beat him and other workers who performed poorly, but not seriously and never to death. The pig farm was as good as it got for Shin at Camp 14. He even sneaked the occasional mid-afternoon nap.

  Mealtime portions in the farm’s cafeteria were no larger than at the cement factory, the textile mill, or the mines. Nor was the food any better. But between meals, Shin could help himself to ground corn intended for the piglets he fed between November and July. Out in the fields, where he weeded and harvested from August to October, he snacked on corn, cabbage and other vegetables. On occasion, the foremen would bring a cooking pot out to the fields and everyone could eat his or her fill.

  The farm was located up in the mountains, away from the river, about half an hour’s walk from Shin’s former school and the house where he had lived with his mother. Women with children walked back and forth to the farm from family housing, but most of the farm workers stayed in a dormitory on the mountain.

  Shin slept there on the floor in a room for men. Bullying was not a problem. He did not have to fight for a warm patch of concrete. He slept well.

  There was a slaughterhouse on the farm where fifty or so pigs were butchered twice a year, exclusively for guards and their families. As a prisoner, Shin was not allowed to eat pork or the meat of any livestock raised on the farm, but he and other prisoners could sometimes steal. The smell of roasting pork on the farm would alert guards, leading to beatings and weeks of half rations, so they ate purloined pork raw.

  What Shin did not do on the farm was think, talk, or dream about the outside world.

  No one there mentioned the escape plan that had led to the execution of his mother and brother. The guards did not ask Shin to snitch on fellow workers. The anger that overwhelmed him in the wake of his mother’s death receded into numbness. Before he was tortured, confined in the underground prison and exposed to Uncle’s stories about the world beyond the fence, Shin had been uninterested in anything beyond his next meal.

  On the pig farm, that passive blankness returned. Shin uses the word ‘relaxing’ to describe his time on the camp farm, which lasted from 1999 to 2003.

  Outside the camp during those years, however, life in North Korea was anything but relaxing.

  Famine and floods in the mid-1990s all but destroyed the centrally planned economy. The government’s Public Distribution System, which had fed most North Koreans since the 1950s, collapsed. As a panicked response to hunger and starva
tion, bartering trade ran wild and private markets exploded in number and importance. Nine out of ten households traded to survive.1 More and more North Koreans sneaked across the border into China for food, work, trade and flight to South Korea. Neither China nor North Korea released figures, but estimates of these economic migrants ranged from tens of thousands to four hundred thousand.

  Kim Jong Il tried to control the chaos. His government created a new network of detention centres for traders who travelled without authorization. But with crackers and cigarettes they could often buy their freedom from hungry police and soldiers. Rail stations, open-air markets and back alleys in major towns became crowded with starving drifters. The many orphaned children found in these places became known as ‘wandering sparrows’.

  Shin did not yet know this, but grassroots capitalism, vagabond trading and rampant corruption were creating cracks in the police state that surrounded Camp 14.

  Food aid from the United States, Japan, South Korea and other donors mitigated the worst of the famine by the late 1990s. But in an indirect and accidental way, it also energized the market ladies and travelling entrepreneurs who would give Shin sustenance, cover and guidance in his escape to China.

  Unlike any other aid recipient in the world, North Korea’s government insisted on sole authority for transporting donated food. The demand angered the United States, the country’s largest aid donor, and frustrated the monitoring techniques that the UN World Food Programme had developed around the world to track aid and make sure it reached the intended recipients. But since the need was so urgent and the death toll so high, the West swallowed its disgust and delivered more than one billion dollars’ worth of food to North Korea between 1995 and 2003.

  During these years, refugees from North Korea arrived in the South and told government officials that they had seen donated rice, wheat, corn, vegetable oil, non-fat dried milk, fertilizer, medicine, winter clothing, blankets, bicycles and other aid items on sale in private markets. Pictures and videos taken in the markets showed bags of grain marked as ‘A Gift from the American People’.

  Bureaucrats, party officials, army officers and other well-placed government elites ended up stealing about thirty per cent of the aid, according to estimates by outside scholars and international aid agencies. They sold it to private traders, often for dollars or euros, and delivered the goods using government vehicles.

  Without intending to do so, wealthy donor countries injected a kind of adrenaline rush into the grubby world of North Korean street trading. The lucrative theft of international food aid whetted the appetite of higher-ups for easy money as it helped transform private markets into the country’s primary economic engine.

  Private markets, which today supply most of the food North Koreans eat, have become the fundamental reason why most outside experts say a catastrophic 1990s-style famine is unlikely to happen again. The markets, though, have not come close to eliminating hunger or malnutrition. They also appear to have increased inequity, creating a chasm between those who have figured out how to trade and those who have not.

  In late 1998, a few months before Shin was assigned to the pig farm, the World Food Programme conducted a nutrition survey of children, which covered seventy per cent of North Korea. It found that about two thirds of those surveyed were stunted or underweight. The numbers were double that of Angola, then at the end of a long civil war, and the North Korean government became furious when they were released to the public.

  Ten years later, when private markets in the North were well established and selling everything from imported fruit to Chinese-made CD players, nutrition in state-run institutions for children and the elderly had barely improved, according to a World Food Programme nutrition survey that was tolerated by the government as a condition of receiving aid.

  ‘The children looked very sad, very emaciated, very pathetic,’ a nutritionist who worked on the 2008 food survey told me. She had participated in previous nutrition surveys dating back to the late 1990s and concluded that chronic hunger and severe malnutrition had persisted in much of North Korea despite the spread of markets.

  International nutrition surveys have also found a pervasive pattern of geographic inequity. Hunger, stunting and wasting diseases are three to four times more prevalent in remote provinces of North Korea – home to the hostile classes – than they are in and around Pyongyang.

  As Shin found in the labour camp, the most secure place for powerless North Koreans to live amid chronic hunger is a farm. By all indications, farmers – excepting those whose land was ruined by floods – weathered the famine far better than city dwellers. Even though they worked on cooperative farms, where crops belonged to the state, they were in a position to hide and hoard food, as well as selling it for cash or trading it for clothing and other necessities.

  The government had little choice – after the famine, the collapse of its food-distribution system and the rise of private markets – but to offer farmers higher prices and increase incentives to grow more food. Private farming on small plots of land was legalized in 2002. This allowed more private farm-to-market trade, which increased the power of traders and the autonomy of productive farmers.

  Kim Jong Il, however, never warmed to market reform and his government called it ‘honey-coated poison’.

  ‘It is important to decisively frustrate capitalist and non-socialist elements in their bud,’ according to the Rodong Sinmun, the party newspaper in Pyongyang. ‘Once the imperialist ideological and cultural poisoning is tolerated, even the faith unshakable before the threat of a bayonet will be bound to give in like a wet mud-wall.’

  The capitalism that bloomed in the cities and small towns of North Korea weakened the government’s iron grip on everyday life and did little to enrich the state. Kim Jong Il grumbled publicly, saying, ‘Frankly the state has no money, but individuals have two years’ budget worth.’2

  His government counter-attacked.

  As part of the ‘military first’ era that Kim’s government officially proclaimed in 1999, the Korean People’s Army, with more than a million soldiers to feed three times a day, moved aggressively to confiscate a substantial slice of all food grown on cooperative farms.

  ‘At harvest time, soldiers bring their own trucks to the farms and just take,’ Kwon Tae-jin, a specialist on North Korean agriculture at the Korea Rural Economic Institute, which is funded by the South Korean government, told me in Seoul.

  In the far north, where food supplies are historically lean and farmers are regarded as politically hostile, the military takes a quarter of total grain production, Kwon said. In other areas of the country, it takes five to seven per cent. To make sure that workers at state farms do not short change the military, the army stations soldiers at all three thousand of the farms throughout the harvest season. When tens of thousands of city dwellers are brought to the farms to assist with the fall harvest, soldiers monitor them to make sure they do not steal food.

  The permanent deployment of soldiers on farms has spawned corruption. Kwon said that farm managers pay off soldiers, who then turn a blind eye to large-scale theft of food that is later sold in private markets. Disputes among groups of corrupt soldiers periodically lead to fistfights and shootouts, according to a number of defectors and reports by aid groups. Good Friends, the Buddhist aid group with informants in the North, reported in 2009 that one soldier on a state farm was stabbed with a sickle during a fight over corn.

  Sealed away on the pig farm, Shin heard nothing about the street trading, corruption and extralegal intercity travel that would, in less than two years’ time, help him escape.

  Holed up on a mountaintop that was a kind of camp within the camp, he drifted uneventfully through the last of his teenage years, keeping his head down, his mind blank and his energies focused on stealing food. His most vivid memory of those years was getting busted for barbecuing stolen pig intestines. He was beaten, deprived of food for five days, and his cafeteria rations were cut in half for three mo
nths.

  Turning twenty on the farm, he believed he had found the place where he would grow old and die.

  But the pig farm interlude ended abruptly in March 2003. For reasons never explained, Shin was transferred to the camp’s garment factory, a crowded, chaotic, stressful work site where two thousand women and five hundred men made military uniforms.

  At the factory, Shin’s life again became complicated. There was relentless pressure to meet production quotas, as well as renewed pressure to snitch. Guards scavenged for sex among the factory’s seamstresses.

  There was also a newcomer, an educated prisoner from Pyongyang. He had been schooled in Europe and had lived in China. He was to tell Shin about what he was missing.

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  A thousand women stitched together military uniforms during twelve-hour shifts, and when their temperamental foot-powered sewing machines broke down, Shin fixed them.

  He was responsible for about fifty machines and the seam-stresses who operated them. If the machines did not spew out their daily quota of army uniforms, Shin and the seamstresses were forced to perform ‘bitter humiliation work’, which meant two extra hours on the floor of the factory, usually from ten to midnight.

  Experienced seamstresses could keep their machines in working order, but those who were new, inept, or very ill could not. To fix a broken machine, which was forged out of cast iron at a foundry inside Camp 14, Shin and the other repairmen had to haul it on their backs to a repair shop upstairs.

  The extra labour incensed many of the repairmen, who took their anger out on the seamstresses by grabbing their hair, slamming their heads against walls and kicking them in the face. Foremen in the factory, who were prisoners chosen by guards for their toughness, generally looked the other way when seamstresses were beaten. They told Shin that fear encouraged production.