Long Road Home: Testimony of a North Korean Camp Survivor (19 page)

“Friend, I hope you succeed, I hope you reach the outside safely.”

I could not say anything.

We only had minutes until everyone came back to their posts after grain picking. I quickly got under the car and crawled into that tiny space. It all happened so quickly that I only understood the potential grave consequences of what I had done when I heard the sound of falling coal on top of the panel. What if the guards found out that I had disappeared in the morning? By 10:00 a.m. they would surely notice. At that moment, gruesome images of the publicly hanged prisoners came to my mind. Would people end up throwing stones and spitting on my dead body like we had done to the hanged young former special agent? His tattered shoes were almost touching the wooden platform where the gallows were set up, baring the tortured ankles covered with dark bruises and blood stains. His head was silently hanging, but when I passed by, I felt the eerie sensation that he was still alive, looking down on me. Although his face was bloated like a purple balloon and every tiny blood vessel in his eyes stood out, I felt that this guy had not completely departed. I had never believed that one’s hair could stand up at frightening thoughts, but when the image of the hanging body came back to my mind, I felt as if all my body hair stood up. I do not know how much time I thought about the dead ones, but the train started moving. Then my thoughts shifted to the metal press that would descend on the open car by the entrance to the mine. I was not sure if it would kill me or not. Anything was possible, and I literally felt like yelling out loud to stop the train so that I could get out of the car. When I heard the metal press descending onto each car lined up ahead of mine, my body shrank. When the coal in the car where I hid was pressed down, I closed my eyes. The large piece of coal that created the space between the metal panel and the floor cracked slightly and the panel descended a little, pressing my body down even harder. The weight of coal above me restricted my breathing, and I was soaked in cold sweat. I became completely restless, as if a strong electric current were constantly flowing through my body.

After the metal press had compressed all the cars, the train started to move faster. Even after it had departed the camp site, I was still frightened. The ride was rough and I feared the piece of coal that sustained my life was going to crumble any minute, turning all my efforts and struggle into nothing. As time passed, I was also increasingly tormented by suspicion. What if my friend betrayed me and told the guards that I had escaped by hiding in the train? Would he inform them, hoping to receive more food or be transferred to a safer work site? Prisoners did everything possible in order to get more food and a safer place to work. There were frequent accidents in the mine shaft, and seeing dead bodies carried out of the underground tunnel was part of the daily ritual. This would make any mining prisoner want to work elsewhere. But would he really do it? No way, I thought. The guards would know that I could not have lifted the heavy metal panel by myself. There had to be a collaborator. And if they found out that it was my co-worker, he would surely be executed. When the guards found out that I was missing, they might interrogate my friend, which would involve torture and even more starvation. He could prevent this by telling the truth in advance. In hindsight, my friend completely sacrificed his chance of survival for my sake, but at that moment, I could not help worrying about his fidelity.

It was awful to constantly imagine that they could stop the train any minute and drag me out. Every time the train slowed down, I felt like I was going to lose my breath. The worst moment was when the train stopped at the West Pyongyang Station for three to four hours. Having traveled all over the country for many years on business trips, I knew clearly where I was. The train had traveled southwest of Camp No. 18, the opposite direction of where I ultimately had to reach, that is, the border between Korea and Russia or Korea and China. However, most cargo trains had to pass through West Pyongyang, which was not a passenger station but a shipment depot located at a crossroads for many routes, wherever their final destinations were. There railroad workers spent hours checking cargo and train wheels. Even though I was aware of this, when the train did not move for so long, I was almost certain that they were searching for me. I flinched even more. Then I remembered a dream I’d had the night before my escape. In it I was a little child standing in a field full of chestnuts. I wanted to move, but I was barefoot. I did not know where my shoes were and I could not move an inch, not knowing what to do. Now in reality I felt the same desperate confusion. I knew that I had to get out of the car when the train stopped, but I had to do it in a secluded rural station in pitch darkness. Pyongyang was too crowded and it was not completely dark on the tracks, so I did not plan on escaping there. But when I thought the search was going on, I almost felt like taking the risk. Finally the train started moving again, and I knew that I had to get out at the next station for sure. The train in which I was hiding clearly displayed that its final destination was Muncheon, a town in Gang-won province, located nearby where I had worked in my youth. I knew the town well, but it was too far from the border. Go-on, a quiet railroad town at the border of South Pyeong-an and South Hamgyeong provinces, would be a better place to get off, since from there I could catch a train to Cheongjin, where I had a very close friend to ask for help. But even if I did not succeed in getting off at Go-on station, there was no reason to panic because I knew there was a direct line between Muncheon and Go-on that I could hide in. While these thoughts were competing in my head, I knew that they were only thoughts and the future had a mind of its own. I had no control over it and had to go as chance guided me.

Around 4:00 a.m. the train arrived in Go-on. It was dark, as there were not many searchlights. Even though Go-on was a small town, it bordered many provinces and many railways intersected there. This meant that the train would be stopped long enough for me to escape. The railroad workers checked the wheels of the train to see if everything was all right. I heard them talking to one another in a distinctive local accent when they passed by the car I was hiding in. I planned to catch a train to Cheongjin, where my old friend G from Revolutionary School lived. He was one of the friends who had traveled from Pyongyang to Cheongjin after we graduated. Since relocating required the official endorsement of the local government or the party, not many North Koreans moved their residence at will. So I was sure that he would still be in the area.

I crawled out of the train and could not move for several minutes because my joints were numb. I lay in silent pain beside the track. But it was dangerous to hang around too long at the railroad station, even though it was pitch dark outside. So I crawled and dragged myself gradually to a riverbank far from the railroad and sat down on the ground. I started to look for dry grass to clean my face, but I could not rub too much because my entire face was covered with all sorts and sizes of pimples due to malnutrition and lack of exposure to the sun. There was a full moon that night, and the river reflected the bright, indifferent moonlight. I could see my reflection clearly, down to every blemish and every contour of my distorted face. I was completely black from head to toe. On the moving train, the wind had blown through the hole and coated my face and body with soot, turning me into a monstrous creature that hardly looked human. I sat there under the moonlight and cried. Tears would not stop running down my face. I had never cried so hard during my six years of imprisonment, but now my emotions erupted all of a sudden. I asked myself how different life would have been if I hadn’t been subjected to six years in the camp. How did all this happen, and why?

Having let out my emotions, I again began to move quickly. I washed my face in the river and started to search for clothes to wear. I still had my prisoner’s dark gray uniform on and had to find civilian clothes as soon as possible. I saw some huts nearby and could see that there were clothes hanging outdoors. The air was cold and dry in late autumn, and many people left their lice-infested clothing outside so that the pests would freeze. The only problem was that there were dogs everywhere. If I were to get near those huts and one dog started barking, all the others would follow suit. I finally made up my mind to risk going back closer to town. There was simply no way to avoid the barking dogs. So I went back to the train station, where there was a dormitory for railroad workers nearby. It was still and quiet, but there might be hidden eyes watching me. As I expected, there were railroad workers’ uniforms hanging outside the dorm on a rope, but even in darkness, I could see that they were ragged, with patches all over. Of course the workers would not leave their better uniforms outside for someone to steal. I quickly grabbed a complete uniform and found a pair of padded winter shoes and ran back to the remote area. My legs were shaking with weakness, but I was swift and quiet in my movements. The ragged uniform was all I needed and I felt lucky to get hold of it. When I took my prisoner’s uniform off, there was a full layer of coal soot on my entire body. I washed it off with water, put on the railroad worker’s uniform. I dug with bare hands and rocks at the hard frosty ground and buried the camp uniform. Only then—only then—I became overwhelmed by intense gratitude toward my friend who had let me take the chance to escape. I kept frantically saying to myself,
What could I do for you, what would you do to escape, what could I do, what would you do?
My entire body shook as if I were possessed. His timid eyes were still watching me from the darkness of the shaft where the coal train was parked. He was asking me to get into the car in a sorrowful voice. Tears soaked my face again and my heart was filled with regrets that he could not be here with me. I cried out that he had to be still in the darkest hell so that I could be here now.

Much later, I learned through some peddlers who go back and forth between China and Pyongyang that my friend who had helped me escape died of hunger in No. 18. Since he was a relatively influential figure in Pyongyang politics, the guards must have told someone in Pyongyang and the news reached the peddlers. As I think about it now, my friend was in frail condition but was among the stronger prisoners. To this day, I seriously doubt that he starved to death. There must have been some other reason. It tears me to pieces when I think about how he must have collapsed and gasped for his last breath under savage hands, never to see the outside world again.

In 1999, the North Korean economy was absolutely devastated. Due to extreme energy shortages, the trains ran slowly and irregularly, if they ran at all. Oftentimes a train would stop in the middle of nowhere due to lack of fuel. If this happened in the middle of winter, freezing passengers would pull out seats—whether they were upholstered seats from first class or simple wooden ones from the second and third classes—and burn them in the fields to stay warm. Therefore the passenger trains were gutted, as if there had been some rough raids. The timetables at the station did not mean anything and passengers had to stick around to catch anything that came by. Now that I was wearing “normal” clothes, I would invite less suspicion. But I did not have any money, so a cargo train looked like a better idea than a passenger train. Not only me, but any passenger frustrated with waiting would hop onto a cargo train without paying. There would often be violent altercations between free riders and train conductors, but those scenes were nothing out of the ordinary in those days.

While waiting in Go-on station, wearing the railroad worker’s uniform, I saw a PRC-made military truck drive into the waiting area. My heart dropped. The truck looked like a patrol car deployed to arrest me, and I quickly hid behind the wheels of the nearest train parked at the station. The truck stopped and its occupants got out and began loading the bodies scattered around the station. I thought those were weary passengers who had fallen asleep while waiting for any train to pass by, but the bodies did not respond when they were thrown onto the truck like bags of garbage. When I was arrested and sent to camp in 1993, the situation in North Korea was bad, but it wasn’t as ghastly as in 1999. In penal labor camps prisoners were well aware of what was happening in the outside world and politics, even more so than the people in society, because any big shots fallen out of favor would be sent to join us. But even though I knew that people were suffering from starvation, I did not expect death to be so prevalent, making life at the camp not so different from life in the world beyond the barbed wire. Later I heard that many orphans and homeless people flocked to train stations for shelter from the cold, but were driven out by station workers who want to avoid any responsibility. Late at night the homeless and orphans came back anyway and many ended up dead of cold and starvation, so it had become a ritual that at dawn a patrol truck carried away the piles of unmoving bodies on the floor of the waiting area, dead or not.

When I hopped onto the next cargo train going in the direction my close friend lived, I ran into some people who looked not too different from me. Because the cargo train transported coal and the blowing wind covered passengers’ faces with soot, everyone was dirty. Everyone looked famished and jaded, just like the prisoners I’d left behind. At first I was relieved that I did not stand out among the crowd, but the more I observed, the sadder I became. How had our homeland become so devastated? I remembered the excursions I’d taken as a child in the orphanage and the Revolutionary School. We traveled by train and visited many revolutionary sites. The trains were clean and pleasant then, which made us children look forward to the next ride. What I was seeing now was a rotten corpse of the train from my childhood memory.

My mind was racing at the speed of the aged locomotive. I leaned against the shaking wall of the car and started to think about what I needed to do. As I’d worked in the National Security Agency before my arrest, I knew that if I crossed the Duman River to the Chinese side within a week of my escape, I would be safe. It would take that long for the agency to distribute my photo for a national search. Unlike elsewhere in the world where a computer network could transmit my image within seconds, in North Korea, if the NSA wanted to issue an all-points bulletin for me, they would have to print tons of photos and distribute them by truck. Plus, I knew well that if a prisoner disappeared from a penal labor camp, the checkpoints were closed and the guards started searching inside the camp. After all, it was really impossible to run away from there, so when prisoners went unaccounted for, it often turned out that they had committed suicide or died in accidents.