Despite Park’s anger – at the rottenness of North Korea, his wife and himself – he always carried himself with dignity, especially when it was time to eat.
Shin found this utterly amazing. Everyone he knew in the camp behaved like a panicked animal at mealtimes. Park, even when hungry, did not. When Shin caught rats in the factory, Park insisted on patience. He refused to allow Shin to eat them until they’d found a furnace or flame where the rat could be spread out on the head of a shovel and cooked properly.
Park could also be a blithe spirit. In Shin’s view, he sometimes took this a bit too far.
Take, for example, Park’s singing.
In the middle of a night shift on the floor of the factory, Park alarmed Shin by bursting into song.
‘Hey! What do you think you are doing?’ Shin asked, fearing that a foreman might hear.
‘Singing,’ Park said.
‘Stop at once,’ Shin told him.
Shin had never sung a song. His only exposure to music had been on the farm, when trucks with loudspeakers played military marching music while prisoners picked weeds. To Shin, singing seemed unnatural and insanely risky.
‘Would you like to sing with me?’ Park asked.
Shin vigorously shook his head and waved his hands, trying to silence Park.
‘Who would hear me at this hour?’ Park said. ‘Sing after me this once.’
Shin refused.
Park asked why he was so afraid of a little song when he was willing to hear seditious stories about how Kim Jong Il was a thief and North Korea was a hellhole?
Shin explained that he tolerated such things because Park had the good sense to whisper. ‘I wish you wouldn’t sing,’ Shin said.
Park agreed not to. But a few nights later, he again broke into song and offered to teach Shin the lyrics. Although dubious and afraid, Shin listened and sang with Park, but quietly.
The lyrics of ‘Song of the Winter Solstice’, which recent defectors say is the theme song of a popular programme on North Korean state television, are about travelling companions who endure hardship and pain.
As we all walk down life’s long, long road,
We will remain warm travelling companions, standing against the lashes of wind and rain.
Along that road there will be happiness and suffering.
We will overcome; we will endure all of life’s tempests.
It is still the only song Shin knows.
In November, not long after Park was assigned to the textile factory, four Bowiwon guards paid a surprise visit to the prisoners’ nightly meeting of self-criticism. Two of them were unfamiliar faces and Shin believed they were from outside the camp.
As the meeting ended, the chief guard said he wanted to talk about lice, a chronic problem in the camps. He asked prisoners to step forward if they were infested.
A man and a woman who were leaders in their respective dormitory rooms stood. They said lice were out of control in their quarters. Guards gave each of them a bucket filled with a cloudy liquid that smelled, to Shin, like agricultural chemicals.
To demonstrate its effectiveness in controlling lice, the guards asked five men and five women in each of the infested dorm rooms to wash themselves with the cloudy liquid. Shin and Park, of course, had lice, but they were not given an opportunity to use the treatment.
In about a week, all ten prisoners who had washed with the liquid developed boils on their skin. After several weeks, their skin began to putrefy and flake off. They had high fevers that kept them from working. Shin saw a truck arrive at the factory and watched as the ailing prisoners were loaded into it. He never saw them again.
It was then, in mid-December 2004, that Shin decided he had had enough and began thinking about escape.
Park made those thoughts possible. He changed the way Shin connected with other people. Their friendship broke a lifelong pattern, stretching back to Shin’s malignant relationship with his mother, of wariness and betrayal.
Shin was no longer a creature of his captors. He believed he had found someone to help him survive.
Their relationship echoed, in many ways, the bonds of trust and mutual protection that kept prisoners alive and sane in Nazi concentration camps. In those camps, researchers found, the ‘basic unit of survival’ was the pair, not the individual.
‘[I]t was in the pairs that the prisoners kept alive the semblance of humanity,’ concluded Elmer Luchterhand, a sociologist at Yale who interviewed fifty-two concentration camp survivors shortly after liberation.1
Pairs stole food and clothing for each other, exchanged small gifts and planned for the future. If one member of a pair fainted from hunger in front of an SS officer, the other would prop him up.
‘Survival . . . could only be a social achievement, not an individual accident,’ wrote Eugene Weinstock, a Belgian resistance fighter and Hungarian-born Jew who was sent to Buchenwald in 1943.2
Finally the death of one member of a pair often doomed the other. Women who knew Anne Frank in the Bergen-Belsen camp said that neither hunger nor typhus killed the young girl who would become the most famous diarist of the Nazi era. Rather, they said, she lost the will to live after the death of her sister, Margot.3
Like Nazi concentration camps, labour camps in North Korea use confinement, hunger and fear to create a kind of Skinner box1: a closed, closely regulated chamber in which guards assert absolute control over prisoners.4 Yet while Auschwitz existed for only three years, Camp 14 is a fifty-year-old Skinner box, an ongoing longitudinal experiment in repression and mind control in which guards breed prisoners whom they control, isolate and pit against each other from birth.
The miracle of Shin’s friendship with Park is how quickly it blew up the box.
Park’s spirit, his dignity and his incendiary information gave Shin something that was both enthralling and unbearable: a context, a way to dream about the future.
He suddenly understood where he was and what he was missing.
Camp 14 was no longer home; it was an abhorrent cage.
And Shin now had a well-travelled, broad-shouldered friend to help him get out.
PART TWO
14
Their plan was simple – and insanely optimistic.
Shin knew the camp. Park knew the world. Shin would get them over the fence. Park would lead them to China, where his uncle would give them shelter, money and assistance in travelling on to South Korea.
Shin was the first to suggest that they escape together. But before he broached the idea, he fretted for days, fearing that Park might be an informer, that he was being set up and that he would be executed like his mother and brother. Even after Park embraced the idea, Shin’s paranoia was difficult to shake: he had sold out his own mother; why shouldn’t Park sell him out?
Still, the escape plan, such as it was, went forward. Shin’s excitement overcame his fear. He would wake up in high spirits after a night of dreaming about grilled meat. Carrying sewing machines up and down factory stairs no longer wore him out. For the first time in his life, Shin had something to look forward to.
Since Park was under orders to follow Shin around, every working day became a marathon session of whispered escape preparations and motivational stories about the fine dining awaiting them in China. They decided that if guards discovered them at the fence, Park would take them out using tae kwon do. Although the guards carried automatic weapons, Shin and Park persuaded each other that their chances of not getting killed were good.
By any measure, these expectations were absurd. Just two people other than Shin are known to have escaped from any political prison camp in North Korea and made it to the West. One is Kim Yong, the former lieutenant colonel who had highly placed friends across North Korea. But he did not go over the fence. He escaped because of what he described as a ‘totally miraculous chance’. In 1999, during the government breakdown and the security lapses that marked the height of the North Korean famine, Kim hid under a metal panel wedged into the bottom of a
dilapidated train car, which was being loaded with coal. When the train rolled out of Camp 18, so did Kim, who knew the countryside well and used his personal contacts at the border to find a safe way to cross into China.
Kim fled a prison that was not nearly as well guarded as the one where Shin and Park were planning their escape. As Kim wrote in his memoir, Long Road Home, he could never have escaped from Camp 14 because ‘the guards there acted as if they were on a war front’.1 Before Kim was transferred to the camp he eventually escaped from, he says he spent two years in Camp 14. He described the conditions there as ‘so severe that I could not even think of the possibility’ of flight.
The other escapee is Kim Hye Sook, who also fled Camp 18. Along with her family, she was first imprisoned in the camp in 1975, at the age of thirteen. Authorities released her in 2001, but later sent her back to the same camp. She then escaped, and in 2009 found her way out of North Korea to South Korea, via China, Laos and Thailand.
Shin and Park were unaware of Kim’s escape, and they had no way to gauge the odds of getting out of Camp 14 or of finding safe passage to China. But Park was inclined to believe the radio broadcasts from Seoul, which he had heard while living in China and which focused on the failures and weaknesses of the North Korean government. Park told Shin that the United Nations had begun to criticize human rights violations inside the North’s political labour camps. He also said he had heard that the camps would disappear in the not too distant future.2
Although Park was well-travelled in North Korea and China, he confided to Shin that he knew little about the steep, snowy, thinly populated mountains outside the fence. Nor did he know much about the roads that could lead them safely to China.
Shin knew the layout of the camp from countless days of gathering wood and collecting acorns, but he knew nothing about how to get over or through the high-voltage fence surrounding the camp.
He also found it difficult, during the weeks and days before the escape, to avoid thoughts of what had happened to his mother and brother. It wasn’t guilt he felt. It was fear. He feared he would die as they had. His mind flashed to images of their executions. He imagined standing in front of a firing squad or on a wooden box with a noose around his neck.
Making a calculation that was short on information and long on aspiration, Shin told himself he had a ninety per cent chance of getting through the fence and a ten per cent chance of getting shot.
Shin’s primary pre-escape preparation was to steal warm clothes and new shoes from a fellow prisoner.
That prisoner slept on the same dormitory floor and worked in the factory as a garment cutter, a job that allowed him to accumulate scraps of fabric, which he traded for food and other goods. He was also meticulous about his clothes. Unlike anyone else in the camp, the cutter had assembled a complete extra set of winter clothing and shoes.
Shin had never stolen clothing from another prisoner, but since he had stopped snitching, he’d become increasingly intolerant of prisoners who continued to inform on their neighbours. He particularly disliked the cutter, who reported on everyone who stole food from the factory garden. Shin thought he deserved to be robbed.
Since prisoners did not have access to lockers or any other way of securing their belongings, it was a simple matter for Shin to wait for the cutter to leave the dormitory room, take his belongings and hide them until the escape. The cutter did not suspect Shin when the clothes went missing. The stolen shoes did not fit Shin’s feet (shoes in the camp almost never did), but they were relatively new.
Clothing in the camp was only distributed every six months. By late December, when Shin and Park were planning their escape, Shin’s winter-season pants had holes in the knees and in the seat. When it came time to run, he decided that for warmth he would nevertheless wear his old clothes beneath his stolen clothes. He did not have a coat, hat, or gloves to protect him from the bitter cold.
Planning to escape meant waiting for a work detail that would get Shin and Park out of the factory and give them an excuse to be near the fence.
Their chance came on New Year’s Day, a rare holiday when machines in the factory went silent for two days. Shin learned in late December that on 2 January, the second day of the closure, his crew of sewing-machine repairmen and some of the seamstresses would leave the factory and be escorted to a mountain ridge on the eastern edge of the camp. There, they would spend the day trimming trees and stacking wood.
Shin had worked on that mountain before. It was near the fence that ran along the top of the ridge. Apprised of all this, Park agreed they would escape on 2 January 2005.
When the factory shut down on 1 January, Shin decided, with some reluctance, to pay a final visit to his father.
Their relationship, always distant, had grown colder still. Shin, on the few days when he did not have to work on the farm or in the factory, had rarely taken advantage of camp rules that allowed him to visit. Spending time with his father had become an ordeal.
What made Shin so angry with his father was not clear, at least not to Shin. It was his mother, not his father, who had put his life at risk by plotting an escape when he was thirteen. She and Shin’s brother were the ones who had been complicit in starting a chain of events that resulted in his arrest, torture and abuse from other students in secondary school. His father had been another victim.
But his father was alive and attempting a reconciliation with Shin. By the unforgiving calculus of relations between distant fathers and resentful sons, that was reason enough for Shin’s loathing.
They shared a sullen New Year’s supper in a cafeteria at his father’s work site, eating cornmeal and cabbage soup. Shin made no reference to his escape plan. He had told himself, as he walked to see his father, that any show of emotions, any hint of final leave-taking, could imperil the escape. He did not completely trust him.
His father had tried, after the killing of his wife and eldest son, to be more attentive. He had apologized for being a bad parent and for having exposed the boy to the camp’s savagery. He had even encouraged his son, if he ever got the chance, to ‘see what the world is like’. That lukewarm escape endorsement may have been blandly worded because Shin’s father did not completely trust his son either.
After Shin was assigned to the garment factory, where opportunities to find or steal extra food were particularly meagre, his father had gone to the extraordinary trouble of obtaining some rice flour and sending it to his son as a paternal offering.
When they sat together in the cafeteria, neither mentioned the gift, and when Shin left that evening, there was no special goodbye. He expected that when the guards learned of his escape, they would come for his father and take him back to the underground prison. He was almost certain that his father did not know what was coming.
15
Early the next morning, a foreman from the garment factory herded Shin, Park and about twenty-five other prisoners up the mountain. They set to work near the top of a twelve-hundred-foot slope. The sky was clear and the sun shone brightly on a heavy snow pack, but it was cold and the wind was blowing. Some prisoners used small axes to hack the branches off logged trees, while others stacked wood.
The firewood detail was an extraordinary stroke of good luck as it placed Shin and Park within a stone’s throw of the fence that ran along the spine of the mountain. On the far side of that fence, the terrain canted steeply down, but it was not too steep to be traversed by foot. Not far beyond the fence there was tree cover.
A guard tower rose from the fence line about a quarter of a mile to the north of where the prisoners chopped wood. Guards walking two abreast patrolled the inside perimeter of the fence. Shin noticed lengthy intervals between patrols.
The foreman in charge of the work crew was also a prisoner and therefore unarmed. In the intervals between guard patrols, there was no one close who could fire a weapon at Shin and Park. They had decided earlier that they would bide their time until dusk, when it would be more difficult for guards to track
their footsteps in the snow.
As Shin worked and waited, he brooded about how the other prisoners were oblivious to the fence and the opportunities that lay beyond it. They were like cows, he thought, with a cud-chewing passivity, resigned to their no-exit lives. He had been like them until he met Park.
At around four o’clock, with light draining out of the day, Shin and Park sidled towards the fence, trimming trees as they moved. No one seemed to notice.
Shin soon found himself facing the fence, which was about ten feet high. There was a knee-high berm of snow directly in front of him and then a trail where patrolling guards had tramped it down. Beyond that was a groomed strip of sand, which showed footprint tracks if someone stepped on it. And beyond that was the fence itself, which consisted of seven or eight strands of high-voltage barbed wire, spaced about a foot apart, strung between tall poles.
According to Kwon Hyuk, a defector who worked as a manager at Camp 22, the fences that surround some of the labour camps in North Korea include moats with spikes designed to impale anyone who falls in. Shin saw no moat and no spikes.
He and Park had told each other that if they could get through the fence without touching the wires, they would be fine. As to how they might be able to do that, they were not sure. Yet as the hour of the escape drew nearer, Shin surprised himself by not feeling afraid.
Park, though, was distracted.
After guards had passed along the fence as part of their late-afternoon patrol, Shin heard fear in Park’s voice.
‘I don’t know if I can do this,’ he whispered. ‘Can’t we try it some other time?’
‘What are you talking about,’ Shin said. ‘If we don’t do it now, there won’t be another chance.’
Shin feared it would be months, even years, before they would be allowed outside the factory at dusk near a section of fence that could not be seen from a guard tower.