Long Road Home: Testimony of a North Korean Camp Survivor (17 page)

In addition to the second, the third, and even the fourth generation of wrongdoers, there were quite a few former grandees in Camp No. 18. Kim Chang-nyeong had held a distinguished post in society when he was a member of the Social Security Agency in charge of selecting agents to be dispatched overseas. Everyone coveted his position of great power, but Kim made a fatal mistake, aligning himself with the wrong people, who fell out of Kim Jong-il’s favor. There was another man who used to be a central party officer. He was charged with espionage for personally receiving a Japanese weightlifter, Inoki, at his house when the Japanese visited North Korea. He claimed that he had done this as a sign of hospitality. Those in power knew that the harmless reception of the Japanese was only an excuse covering the real reason for arrest. Just like Kim Chang-nyeong, the officer had sided with people who were not aligned with the Dear Leader Kim Jong-il. Not having done anything wrong personally, and believing that he would explain his case—just like I did when I was arrested—he decided to appeal. He wrote long letters of petition to his friends in Pyongyang but could not find ways to send them. Finally he was able to talk one of the guards into delivering the letters. However, when the messenger brought the mail to the “friends” in the central party office, not all of them regarded themselves as friends of a Japanese spy. Some reported this incident to Kim Jong-il himself, and according to the Dear Leader’s directions, anyone involved, no matter how insignificant they might be, was arrested. One sultry day in August 1996, a truck loaded with fifty or so people arrived at the execution ground. Some of them were freshly arrested while others were familiar faces in the camp. Among them was also the guard who had delivered the letters. The camp authorities were really shooting the messenger.

In 1997, Camp No. 18 welcomed a new group of inmates from the town of Songrim. They were former workers from a steel plant producing the best quality steel in North Korea. The town was famous for having received the blessings of the Great Leader himself, who directly reaped the benefits of the plant’s products. But in 1997, for constantly starved workers, steel became a means of survival—a product they secretly exchanged for low-quality Chinese flour only suitable to feed animals. The hungry workers could not help but choose food over national pride simply in order to survive. When Kim Jong-il found out about this, he was already battling low morale, and he wanted to make an example out of what North Koreans later called the “Songrim incident.” Kim ordered the National Security Agency to dispatch an entire corps to encircle the town. The soldiers ordered the townspeople to stay in their houses and started searching. Twenty-four of the residents had more than three sacks of Chinese flour. They were all dragged to the outskirts of the town and publicly executed, without a trial. The ones who had fewer than three sacks of Chinese flour were rounded up and sent to the camp. Among these were many loyalists who had devoted their lives to serving the Great Leader and the Dear Leader. Their hard work had been distinguished by People’s Medals and Laudatory Medals, but facing constant, unbearable hunger, they had to follow their instinct. Their only crime was their need to eat in order to stay alive.

I could not sleep that night. Although my entire body was aching from the day’s hard labor, my mind was set on fire. I shook with pain and anger at what I had witnessed that day. Loyalists to the state were rotting in this hellish place where death would be far more desirable. I thought of how utterly deceived the newly arrived from Songrim had been. In fact, everyone in this country was deceived, made to believe the false promise of a better life. And when a person simply wished to survive, they had to pay with their life. That night I lay straight on the floor, clenched my teeth, and felt warm sweat moistening my tight fists as I thought,
I will survive. I have to survive. I will, I will, I will, I will! I will!!! Survive and tell the world about what I have witnessed. Otherwise, this insurmountable tragedy will be forgotten, never known to the rest of the world. I will survive to tell it myself. I will
.

Rebels and Collaborators

There were many children in Camp No. 18, second- or third-generation prisoners who were paying for the crimes their parents or grandparents had supposedly committed. They were in the camp because the North Korean state attributed collective guilt to the families of political wrongdoers. The first generation—the real criminals—had to go into the coal mine and provide the hardest labor. The second and third generation also had to provide hard labor as long as the criminal in the family was alive. Only after the first generation died were the second- and third-generation prisoners treated as lesser criminals by the state. This system sometimes invited unbelievable actions. There was an incident of patricide in Camp No. 18. Three sons, all in their thirties, collaborated and killed their father to free themselves from backbreaking labor in the mine shaft. When the guards discovered the crime, they brought out the sons for a trial. The three sons argued that the person they had murdered was not their father, but an enemy of the state who had frequently betrayed the communist fighters during the Korean War. I saw how the sons proclaimed, with great defiance in public, that they wanted to relieve the worries of the Dear Leader Kim Jong-il by getting rid of the bad element in the state. The camp authorities were pleased with these statements and labeled them as “corrigible” prisoners. I personally witnessed this and two other cases of patricide in Camp No. 18, one of which included a daughter murdering her father for the same reason.

While some children regurgitated the state rhetoric to avoid trouble and lead a slightly more comfortable life, there were also invisible rebels in Camp No. 18. Like all spaces in North Korea, the guards’ offices displayed the portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, which were meticulously dusted and polished. However, at times, the glass covering the portraits would be broken and scattered on the floor. Anyone caught venturing to do this certainly would have paid with his or her life. And there would be days, although very rare, when the electricity at the camp would be cut off and no work could be done in the mines. Some prisoners must have risked their lives to commit this sabotage. Some broke the camp rules just to protest, but many did so simply to survive. In the fall when the corn harvest was imminent, the hungry prisoners could not help going into the fields to steal. Camp guards rotated with fully loaded guns to protect the crops. If they noticed a movement in the field, they immediately fired randomly at the tall corn. Despite the grave danger, the prisoners had to go on stealing; otherwise hunger would kill them. Because I was eating part of my mother’s ration, I dealt with the hunger better than others. My mother’s sacrifice allowed me to survive.

Single prisoners were grouped together in several barracks, just like in Camp No. 14. They were in poorer health than the prisoners who lived with their families. I worked with many single male prisoners, who often collapsed in the mine shaft. Their bony bodies were then loaded on a two-wheeled cart and sent to the clinic. Doctors at the camp clinic were also political prisoners. Most of them were highly skilled intellectuals and some had even been trained abroad. There were doctors with degrees from Russian and Eastern European academies. But no matter how good they were, the camp did not have any medicine or medical equipment to cure the ill. For this reason, many camp guards preferred to be diagnosed by doctors in camp rather than see their own doctors in society and then secure necessary medicine through connections for their private use.

Camp guards benefited much from their prisoners’ former connections in society. One guard who knew that I used to work in a trade department took advantage of me. He would call me over to a private place and ask in a stiff manner:

“Hey, I am going to Pyongyang soon. Do you have anything to say to your friends there?”

“What do you need, sir?” I would reply without looking at him.

“I could use a new color TV,” he would reply indifferently.

Then I had to write a letter to my friends in the electronics supply department and ask them to provide a TV set for the guard who bore my note. My friends would recognize my handwriting and signature for sure. When the guard presented the letter to them, they would notice that he was from Camp No. 18 and figure out what was going on immediately. Out of friendship, they probably would have treated the guard well on my behalf and told him to take good care of me before they handed him a brand-new TV set. Then the guard would come back and really take care of me in a surreptitious way. The guards at Camp No. 18 were given dried corn as animal feed for their own household. While the prisoners were starving to death, the guards received food for their stock on a regular basis. When the entrepreneurial guard received his portion of dried corn, he would call me to a warehouse by a pigsty and make me load a bucket full of corn. Then he would make me carry it to my hut while he followed me with a pig. We both knew that other guards were watching us and we had to pretend that we were part of the ordinary scene—a guard directing a prisoner to transport stuff. When we reached the hut, he crassly told me to keep the animal feed there and quickly returned to the pigsty with the pig. When it first happened, I did not know what he really meant, so a few days later, I asked him, “Sir, what should I do with the corn?”

“You do whatever is necessary,” he curtly replied, but till the end, he never openly told me to go ahead and eat the corn.

At other times, he would call me to his office and say, “You son of a bitch, clean this tray as quickly as possible.”

He pointed to a waste bin crudely made of dry straw. He shared an office with other guards and used the normal language any guard would use to prisoners.

The waste bin contained a few pieces of candy. I quickly sorted them out and put them in my pockets before anyone saw them. When I sucked on a piece of candy, I could feel the difference immediately, the sensation of a small source of energy surging in my body. That’s how weak I was then.

But those sweet moments did not last long. The guards were constantly rotated among work units in order to prevent any possibilities of developing human connections with the prisoners. Most guards were strict about rules and went exactly by the book. They had almighty power; if they wished, they could kill any prisoner at any moment. Unlike regular prisons where each inmate’s term ended at a certain time, the camp provided no hope for release, and because of that, there was a silent agreement that anything, absolutely anything, was possible. Among the newly arrived inmates were many pretty women. High-ranking officials from Pyongyang, if they were labeled as antirevolutionary, were sent to the camp with their entire family, including their young daughters. These girls had known no hardship before they ended up in the camp. All their lives, they had been pampered with Japanese and French cosmetics and fine clothes, completely unavailable to the general public. The guards took advantage of them upon their arrival and kept them quiet with threats. Then the girls were made to take relatively easy jobs, such as cleaning office buildings and giving traffic signals to trains. It was so conspicuous which girls were sex slaves of the guards. There was a good-looking girl named Jeong-sun who belonged to this group. Before imprisonment, she had been in an all-female music band that was famous for having attractive members and would often entertain Kim Jong-il and his close retinue. It was never made public, but many knew that the group provided “all sorts” of entertainment to North Korea’s highest leadership. Jeong-sun was sent to the camp because she had divulged secrets about the sex lives of some leaders. In Camp No. 18, she continued her job as usual—the entertainment of leadership. She was given the task of checking the attendance in one of the factories. But just like in society, Jeong-sun could not keep her mouth shut about her nightly work. Three days after the rumors spread, she was found dead in the mountains, shot when she “attempted to escape,” according to the guards. But in reality, the guards must have asked her to go and gather berries at a certain spot. The executioner, who must have arrived there before unsuspecting Jeong-sun did, easily shot her for attempting to escape.

These kinds of execution were frequent. There were many children who were tempted to go to the riverside to catch fish. Their parents must have warned the little ones to stay away from the river, but young as these children were, their playful minds sometimes forgot about the warning. When the guards found them by the riverside, they fired without the slightest hesitation.

There was a shooting range in Camp No. 18. Trucks sometimes brought loads of people from the outside, but instead of putting them in the barracks, they executed them there. There were many rumors about who these people were, and many were suspected to be the senior officials of the state. It looked like Camp No. 18 was the place to execute the condemned. The regime must have regarded the camp as the black hole of the universe where they could dump their dirtiest secrets. For this reason, the camp guards, no matter how low their rank, wore the uniform of the Social Safety Agency as a reminder that they were obliged to protect the darkest secrets of North Korea. When they returned to society to attend meetings or visit other offices, they changed into regular army uniforms.

Seeing Mother for the Last Time

One day Mother disappeared without a trace. A search began. A day later the guards found her lying unconscious in the mountains. Obviously she went up there to gather edible grass to make soup for me, but since she was chronically starved, she lost consciousness and fainted. In No. 18, the rules mandated that inmates should return from the mountains before 5:00 p.m. If they did not, the guards immediately saw it as an attempted escape. Patrols found her on the hill, and even before interrogating her or charging her with trying to escape, they kicked around the frail woman in her seventies, handcuffed her, and dragged her back to the guards’ office. When I returned from the mine at 10:30 p.m., the guards summoned me. As soon as I showed up, they smacked my head with their large hands.