Long Road Home: Testimony of a North Korean Camp Survivor (18 page)

“Son of a bitch, your mom attempted to escape from the camp site. Did you not conspire to escape together?”

“No, sir. She might have been gathering grass to eat. That’s all.” I felt desperate.

“Don’t lie, you damned motherfucker, you must have helped her try to escape!”

Then a couple of them kicked me around with their military boots.

Mother was immediately transferred to special quarters for prisoners condemned to die. The guards kept prisoners there only while they were deciding on the method of execution—hanging or shooting. In the daytime, the detainees would do extremely harsh labor. At night, they were not allowed enough sleep and were forced to do self-criticisms. I was so consumed with worry that a few days after Mother’s arrest I decided to secretively go and watch them work. C, another prisoner with whom I was on friendly terms, accompanied me to the site. They were by the riverside, moving huge rocks to build a new pier. Most of the workers looked very young, and Mother looked like a tiny mouse among them. We visited the site around lunchtime, so I happened to catch a glimpse of how the workers lined up for a handful of boiled corn kernels. Since everyone was starved, they were rushing to get their portion, but Mother could barely walk, disturbing others who wanted to get ahead. The guards came to drag her out of line and tied her to a hammock that hung from a wooden stick, which the prisoners used to transport heavy rocks. If my friend hadn’t been holding me back tightly, I would have grabbed stones and started throwing them at those bestial guards. In trembling silence, through a stream of tears, I saw how Mother was desperately hanging onto the pole to keep from falling to the ground. Her entire body shook with the futile effort to hang onto life. That was the last image of Mother I saw. Later I heard that she lost the ability to go to the toilet on her own.

About a month after I had seen Mother’s last suffering, I escaped Camp No. 18.

Escape   
5

A Risky Plot

I had lost my mother forever, but out of that loss was born a burning desire to learn everything about my family. Now I was the only surviving member of my generation and had to understand why such tragedy had befallen us. I simply had to survive to discover the unknown part of our family history. Mother used to encourage me to escape even before her final arrest. She felt she was doomed to end her life in this atrocious place, but she believed that I still had a chance. I wanted to escape in order to fulfill her wish, but had I attempted it, I would have surely caused my mother unbearable suffering. In No. 18 guards chained prisoners whose family members went missing and hung them with their feet barely touching the ground. The chained ones remained in public sight, unable to eat or go to the toilet, until the case was clarified. The humiliating display was meant to teach everyone a lesson about what would happen to family members if one tried to escape. I had witnessed how those hanged faces turned dark in suffering. This was a lesson learned well, and I did not dare to put my mother in that situation by escaping for my own sake. But now that Mother was simply counting her days to die and I had no hope of seeing her again, I became obsessed with how to realize her wishes. It was a risky idea with almost no chance of success. However, the more impossible it looked, the stronger my desire grew. I was obsessed with clarifying my family history, and that would be possible only if I were alive and free.

The idea of escape had occurred to me when I was transferred to Camp No. 18. The conditions at Camp No. 14 were so severe that I could not even think of the possibility. No. 14 was the worst kind of camp since it imprisoned the enemies of the state. Even the guards there acted as if they were on a war front. However, at Camp No. 18, where the second and the third generations of the enemies were imprisoned, the guards were more humane, and there was more freedom to move around. Knowing Mother’s death was certain, I made up my mind and started to study the surrounding areas carefully. There was a river flowing by the foot of the mountain. I thought of diving into it and breathing through a reed, but I was too weak to swim under water for nearly a mile to reach a safe area. So I abandoned the possibility and soon felt lucky not to have chosen that escape route. I learned that the guards cast many nets in the river that would send signals to their office if large objects were caught. The inmates did not know about this until the guards found the body of a former party official who had committed suicide by throwing himself into the river. After this I thought about hiding inside the supply trucks that transported rationed food to the camp. Getting into a truck would be less of a problem than getting out of it. There would be too much risk involved in trying to emerge at the right time, because the doors were locked from the outside and I did not know how to open them from within. I also thought of escaping in a train that transported coal to the outside world, but it obviously would not work: when the loaded trains left the shaft, a large metal press would descend to the open top of each car, loaded with coal, to compact the load and make sure that nobody was hiding inside. No human being could survive that heavy metal pressure. Then I turned my eyes to the mountains, but soon learned that it would be even more difficult to escape that way. There were not only rows of high walls topped with barbed wire but also numerous traps in between the walls that would tear escapees’ bodies into pieces. The prisoners learned about this when some were brought out to clean the traps and were delighted to find some rabbits caught down there. They were dead, but still fresh enough to eat.

However, there was one incident where an inmate succeeded in escaping No. 18 by the mountain route. He was a young man imprisoned for supposed treason his father had committed. The young man was a former member of a special force in the army where he received a high level of training and was groomed to carry out very difficult missions. He had already been sent to South Korea twice. His father was a central member of the Korean Workers’ Party, but through political conspiracy, the entire family was subject to accusations and inevitable downfall. All four members were sent to Camp No. 18—mother, father, son, and daughter. Like many other new arrivals, the young man’s father was dumbfounded that a hard-core loyalist like himself could end up in a political prison camp. He thought it his duty to correct this grave mistake, primarily to spare his family unjustified punishment, so he wrote a hundred letters to party members, pleading his innocence. Then he managed to bribe a guard to send those letters to Pyongyang. The son was also shocked at the misunderstanding and wanted to clear himself of the charges. Unlike his father, he did not write letters to be delivered to Pyongyang but used his well-trained body to carry them himself. At the time he attempted to escape, he was still fresh, not yet crippled by hunger and labor. He managed to steal a rope from the camp and waited till dark. Then he climbed to the top of the hill where the first fence stood. He climbed to the top of the fence, threw the rope to the second fence, and crossed between them without touching the ground studded with deadly traps. After he managed to get out of the camp, he headed straight to Pyongyang. There he went to the central party office building, scattered into the sky the petition letters he had prepared, and declared that he was wrongly charged with conspiracy and that his only aim in life was to serve the Dear Leader with all his might. Then he slit his stomach with a knife as a sign of fidelity to the regime. It was obvious that he escaped because he wanted to protest the charges, just like I had vainly hoped to do when I was arrested. I guess he was hoping that Kim Jong-il would notice his efforts and grant him and his family clemency and exoneration, but whether Kim Jong-il heard of this or not is unknown. The protestor was taken to the hospital to be treated, and when he recovered, they sent him back to the camp. There he was severely tortured for three months. When he was brought out to be publicly executed, every prisoner was surprised to see that the healthy youth they remembered had shrunk to half his former size. He looked like a little stray dog on the execution ground. When prisoners were executed, the other inmates were supposed to witness the process and then line up to throw stones at or spit on the corpse, denouncing the dead. When I approached the dead body, I noticed numerous traces of harsh torture.

Thus I came to the conclusion that using the front gate would be the best idea. Surprisingly, the security there was relatively loose. At 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, the front entrance was as quiet as the night itself. Maybe the guards did not expect anyone to be so bold as to walk out of there. The gate itself was very tall, but the walls adjacent to it seemed reasonable enough for me to climb. But there were two vicious dogs that would chase me to death if I took that risk. I would have to find a way around them. Securing grilled meat to pacify the dogs was one solution, but how? And even if I got some meat, could I cook it without the other prisoners noticing the smell? Having thought through all my options, I decided that climbing over the front gate when a strong rain shower was pouring down would work. The dogs would not be able to trace my smell as sensitively and people would not hear my footsteps well. I decided to quietly wait for the right time.

Nocturnal Fugitive

Then one day, a totally miraculous chance came unexpectedly.

As I look back, it was more than luck that the chance to escape fell in my lap. There must have been divine guidance leading me to take the risk. That day started off just like any other day at work. Everyone showed up at 7:00 a.m., ate the usual meager portion of boiled corn and wheat with salt, and worked until our backs felt like breaking. But at the end of the day when we were ready to load coal onto the train, the last step in the long daily work routine, we found that there were scattered grains and corn kernels at the bottom of each car. The trains must have just transported food. It wasn’t the first time this had happened, and at such rare chances for extra food, no matter how scarce it might be, all the prisoners went crazy trying to gather grains. Despite threats and harsh punishment, nobody could stop them. My work partner and I were also searching every single corner of the train to gather one more grain. That was when we discovered that the floor of the car was unstable. My work partner was a close childhood friend from the affluent Namsan neighborhood in Pyongyang. Like so many others, he had aligned himself with a boss who had fallen out of the Dear Leader’s favor and ended up in the camp. On the floor of the car was a thin metal panel, about two by three yards at the largest. There were other prisoners in that car, but even though they saw the metal panel, they were so distracted by the grain that they paid no attention. My friend and I immediately realized that this was something extraordinary. The guards soon appeared and started to whistle and curse at the prisoners. Frightened by the guards and happy with their handfuls of grain mixed with soil and dirt, the prisoners went back to work. But my friend and I could not simply leave behind our amazing discovery. So we remained, risking severe punishment if we were found by the guards. Luckily the car was parked in a dark spot, so unless someone approached closely, it was difficult to see us in the general darkness in the shaft. When we tried to lift the panel, weak as we were, it felt very heavy and we could not do it with bare hands. So we took a lever and moved it inch by inch. We were soaked in sweat by the time we could see what was beneath the panel. There were three holes in the dilapidated wooden floor of the train car. At that time North Korea was experiencing a terrible economic crisis, and the state did not have any funds to maintain property or repair damage. As a temporary solution, they must have thrown in the metal panel to keep the grain and coal inside.

When we saw what was underneath the panel, our eyes met and our hearts froze. We both knew what it meant: a golden opportunity never to be repeated again. The metal panel lay flat on the wooden floor and there was no space in between, but if we stuck a large piece of coal into one of the holes and covered it with the metal, room would be created for just one person to hide. We could climb in and out through one of the two remaining holes in the bottom of the train car. But there was a question still unanswered: Would the metal panel be enough protection from the weight of the metal press and the coal? It was at the very bottom of the train where the press could not reach.
Whether it works or not,
I thought,
I will die anyway if I stay in camp, so I might as well die trying to escape.
Then the idea looked feasible, which made my heart beat faster. My friend’s eyes met mine again. We exchanged so many thoughts silently in that split second. Who was going to take this chance? Obviously, there was barely room for one person, and we both wanted to escape. There was not much time to think. It must have been around 11:00 p.m., approximately four and a half hours after we’d entered the shaft for the night’s work, which normally lasted from 7:30 p.m. to 1:00 or 2:00 a.m. The train would start loading soon. Having cleared that particular car, the other prisoners had moved to the rest for their meager harvest. We had to act quickly. We found a largest piece of coal, shoved it into the smallest hole, and pulled the metal panel back on top. That way the larger hole would be reserved for entrance and exit and there would be more space between the metal panel and the wooden floor. At that time, I must have weighed about 88 pounds, whereas my friend weighed more. We both tried to get into the space, but I fit better because of my smaller size.

“Here, you quickly get in and I will pour coal on top.” Finally my friend opened his mouth. I knew how difficult it was for him to give up that golden opportunity for me, but I was so glad that I could not concede.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you so much, I will never forget …” My throat felt the sensation of something warm and painful and I could not finish my sentence. His eyes were filled with sorrow and he embraced me. His warm tears fell on my face.