Escape from Camp 14

  Given these restrictions, most reporting about North Korea was distant and hollow. Written from Seoul or Tokyo or Beijing, stories began with an account of Pyongyang’s latest provocation, such as sinking a ship or shooting a tourist. Then the dreary conventions of journalism kicked in: American and South Korean officials expressed outrage. Chinese officials called for restraint. Think-tank experts opined about what it might mean. I wrote more than my share of these pieces.

  Shin, though, shattered these conventions. His life unlocked the door, allowing outsiders to see how the Kim family sustained itself with child slavery and murder. A few days after we met, Shin’s appealing picture and appalling story ran prominently on the front page of the Washington Post.

  ‘Wow,’ wrote Donald G. Graham, chairman of the Washington Post Company, in a one-word e-mail I received the morning after the story appeared. A German filmmaker, who happened to be visiting Washington’s Holocaust Memorial Museum on the day the story was published, decided to make a documentary about Shin’s life. The Washington Post ran an editorial saying that the brutality Shin endured was horrifying, but just as horrifying was the world’s indifference to the existence of North Korea’s labour camps.

  ‘High school students in America debate why President Franklin D. Roosevelt didn’t bomb the rail lines to Hitler’s camps,’ the editorial concluded. ‘Their children may ask, a generation from now, why the West stared at far clearer satellite images of Kim Jong Il’s camps, and did nothing.’

  Shin’s story seemed to get under the skin of ordinary readers. They wrote letters and sent e-mails, offering money, housing and prayers.

  My article had only skimmed the surface of Shin’s life. It struck me that a deeper account would unveil the secret machinery that enforces totalitarian rule in North Korea. It would also show, through the details of Shin’s improbable flight, how some of that oppressive machinery is breaking down, allowing an unworldly young escapee to wander undetected across a police state and into China. Just as importantly, no one who read a book about a boy bred by North Korea to be worked to death could ever ignore the existence of the camps.

  I asked Shin if he was interested. It took him nine months to make up his mind. During those months, human rights activists in South Korea, Japan and the United States urged him to cooperate, telling him that a book in English would raise world awareness, increase international pressure on North Korea and perhaps put some much needed money in his pocket. After Shin said yes, he made himself available for seven rounds of interviews, first in Seoul, then in Torrance, California, and finally in Seattle, Washington. Shin and I agreed to a fifty-fifty split of whatever the book might earn. Our agreement, though, gave me control over the contents.

  Shin began keeping a diary in early 2006, about a year after his escape from North Korea. In Seoul, after he was hospitalized for depression, he continued writing in it. The diary became the basis for his Korean-language memoir, Escape to the Outside World, which was published in Seoul in 2007 by the Database Center for North Korean Human Rights.

  The memoir was a starting point for our interviews. It was also the source for many of the direct quotations that are attributed in this book to Shin, his family, friends and prison keepers during the time he was in North Korea and China. But every thought and action attributed to Shin in these pages is based on multiple interviews with him, during which he expanded upon and, in many crucial instances, corrected his Korean memoir.

  Even as he cooperated, Shin seemed to dread talking to me. I often felt like a dentist drilling without anaesthetic. The drilling went on intermittently for more than two years. Some of our sessions were cathartic for him, but many made him depressed.

  He struggled to trust me. As he readily admits, he struggles to trust anyone. It is an inescapable part of how he was raised. Guards taught him to sell out his parents and friends, and he assumes everyone he meets will, in turn, sell him out.

  While Shin remained wary of me, he responded to every question about his past that I could think of. His life can seem incredible, but it echoes the experiences of other former prisoners in the camps, as well as the accounts of former camp guards.

  ‘Everything Shin has said is consistent with what I have heard about the camps,’ said David Hawk, a human rights specialist who has interviewed Shin and more than two dozen other former labour camp prisoners for ‘The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps’, a report that links survivor accounts with annotated satellite images. It was first published in 2003 by the US Committee for Human Rights in North Korea and has been updated as more testimony and higher-resolution satellite images became available. Hawk told me that because Shin was born and raised in a camp, he knows things that other camp survivors do not. Shin’s story has also been vetted by the authors of the Korean Bar Association’s ‘White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea’. They conducted extensive interviews with Shin, as well as with other known camp survivors who were willing to talk. As Hawk has written, the only way for North Korea to ‘refute, contradict, or invalidate’ the testimony of Shin and other camp survivors would be to permit outside experts to visit the camps. Otherwise, Hawk declares, their testimony stands.

  If North Korea does collapse, Shin may be correct in predicting that its leaders, fearing war crimes trials, will demolish the camps before investigators can get to them. As Kim Jong Il explained, ‘We must envelope our environment in a dense fog to prevent our enemies from learning anything about us.’6

  To try to piece together what I could not see, I spent the better part of three years reporting about North Korea’s military, leadership, economy, food shortages and human rights abuses. I interviewed scores of North Korean defectors, including three former inmates of Camp 15 and a former camp guard and driver who worked at four labour camps. I spoke to South Korean scholars and technocrats who travel regularly inside North Korea, and I reviewed the growing body of scholarly research on and personal memoirs about the camps. In the United States, I conducted extended interviews with Korean Americans who have become Shin’s closest friends.

  In assessing Shin’s story, one should keep in mind that many others in the camps have endured similar or worse hardships. According to An Myeong Chul, a former camp guard and driver, ‘Shin had a relatively comfortable life by the standards of other children in the camps.’

  By exploding nuclear bombs, attacking South Korea and cultivating a reputation for hair-trigger belligerence, the government of North Korea has stirred up a semi-permanent security emergency on the Korean Peninsula.

  When North Korea deigns to enter into international diplomacy, it has always succeeded in shoving human rights off the negotiating table. Crisis management, usually focused on nuclear weapons and missiles, has dominated American dealings with the North.

  The labour camps have been an afterthought.

  ‘Talking to them about the camps is something that has not been possible,’ David Straub, who worked in the State Department during the Clinton and Bush years as a senior official responsible for North Korea policy, told me. ‘They go nuts when you talk about it.’

  The camps have barely pricked the world’s collective conscience. In the United States, newspaper stories notwithstanding, ignorance of their existence remains widespread. For several years in Washington, a handful of North Korean defectors and camp survivors gathered each spring on the Mall for speeches and marches. The Washington press corps paid little attention. Part of the reason was language. Most of the defectors spoke only Korean. As important, in a media culture that feeds on celebrity, no movie star, pop idol or Nobel Prize winner stepped forward to demand that outsiders invest emotionally in a distant issue that lacks good video footage.

  ‘Tibetans have the Dalai Lama and Richard Gere, Burmese have Aung San Suu Kyi, Darfurians have Mia Farrow and George Clooney,’ Suzanne Scholte, a long-time activist who brought camp survivors to Washington, told me. ‘North Koreans have no one like that.’

  Shin told me he does not dese
rve to speak for the tens of thousands still in the camps. He is ashamed of what he did to survive and escape. He has resisted learning English, in part because he does not want to have to tell his story again and again in a language that might make him important. But he desperately wants the world to understand what North Korea has tried so diligently to hide. His burden is a heavy one. No one else born and raised in the camps has escaped to explain what went on inside – what still goes on inside.

  PART ONE

  1

  Shin and his mother lived in the best prisoner quarters Camp 14 had to offer: a ‘model village’ next to an orchard and just across from the field where his mother was later hanged.

  Each of the forty one-storey buildings in the village housed four families. Shin and his mother had their own room, where they slept side by side on a concrete floor. The four families shared a common kitchen, which had a single bare light bulb. Electricity ran for two hours a day, from four to five in the morning and ten to eleven at night. Windows were made of grey vinyl too opaque to see through. Rooms were heated in the Korean way by a coal fire in the kitchen with flues running under the bedroom floor. The camp had its own coal mines and coal for heating was readily available.

  There were no beds, chairs or tables. There was no running water. No bath or shower. Prisoners who wanted to bathe sometimes sneaked down to the river in the summer. About thirty families shared a well for drinking water. They also shared a privy, which was divided in half for men and women. Defecating and urinating there was mandatory, as human waste was used as fertilizer on the camp farm.

  If Shin’s mother met her daily work quota, she could bring home food for that night and the following day. At four in the morning, she would prepare breakfast and lunch for her son and for herself. Every meal was the same: corn porridge, pickled cabbage and cabbage soup. Shin ate this meal nearly every day for twenty-three years, unless he was denied food as punishment.

  When he was still too young for school, his mother often left him alone in the house in the morning, and came back from the fields at midday for lunch. Shin was always hungry and he would eat his lunch as soon as his mother left for work in the morning.

  He also ate her lunch.

  When she came back at midday and found nothing to eat, she would become furious and beat her son with a hoe, a shovel, anything that was close at hand. Some of the beatings were as violent as those he later received from the guards.

  Still, Shin took as much food as he could from his mother as often as he could. It did not occur to him that if he ate her lunch she would go hungry. Many years later, after she was dead and he was living in the United States, he would tell me that he loved his mother. But that was in retrospect. That was after he had learned that a civilized child should love his mother. When he was in the camp – depending upon her for all his meals, stealing her food, enduring her beatings – he saw her as competition for survival.

  Her name was Jang Hye Gyung. Shin remembers her as small and slightly plump with powerful arms. She wore her hair cut short, like all women in the camp, and was required to cover her head with a white cloth folded into a triangle that tied around the back of her neck. Shin discovered her birth date – 1 October 1950 – from a document he saw during his interrogation in the underground prison.

  She never talked to him about her past, her family, or why she was in the camp, and he never asked. His existence as her son had been arranged by the guards. They chose her and the man who became Shin’s father as prizes for each other in a ‘reward’ marriage.

  Single men and women slept in dormitories segregated by sex. The eighth rule of Camp 14, as Shin was required to memorize it, said, ‘Should sexual physical contact occur without prior approval, the perpetrators will be shot immediately.’

  Rules were the same in other North Korean labour camps. If unauthorized sex resulted in a pregnancy or a birth, the woman and her baby were usually killed, according to my interviews with a former camp guard and several former prisoners. They said that women who had sex with guards in an attempt to get more food or easier work knew that the risks were high. If they became pregnant, they disappeared.

  A reward marriage was the only safe way around the no-sex rule. Marriage was dangled in front of prisoners as the ultimate bonus for hard work and reliable snitching. Men became eligible at twenty-five, women at twenty-three. Guards announced marriages three or four times a year, usually on propitious dates, such as New Year’s Day or Kim Jong Il’s birthday. Neither bride nor groom had much say in deciding whom they would marry. If one partner found his or her chosen mate to be unacceptably old, cruel, or ugly, guards would sometimes cancel a marriage. If they did, neither the man nor the woman would be allowed to marry again.

  Shin’s father, Shin Gyung Sub, told Shin that the guards gave him Jang as payment for his skill in operating a metal lathe in the camp’s machine shop. Shin’s mother never told Shin why she had been given the honour of marriage.

  But for her, as for many brides in the camp, marriage was a kind of promotion. It came with a slightly better job and better housing – in the model village, where there was a school and health clinic. Shortly after her marriage, she was transferred there from a crowded dormitory for women in the camp’s garment factory. Jang was also given a coveted job on a nearby farm, where there were opportunities to steal corn, rice and green vegetables.

  After their marriage, the couple was allowed to sleep together for five consecutive nights. From then on, Shin’s father, who continued to live in a dormitory at his work site, was permitted to visit Jang a few times a year. Their liaison produced two sons. The eldest, Shin He Geun, was born in 1974. Shin was born eight years later.

  The brothers barely knew each other. When Shin was born, his older brother was away in primary school for ten hours a day. By the time Shin was four, his brother had moved out of the house (at the mandatory age of twelve) and into a dormitory.

  As for his father, Shin remembers that he sometimes showed up at night and left early in the morning. He paid little attention to the boy, and Shin grew up indifferent to his presence.

  In the years after he escaped the camp, Shin learned that many people associate warmth, security and affection with the words ‘mother’, ‘father’ and ‘brother’. That was not his experience. The guards taught him and the other children in the camp that they were prisoners because of the ‘sins’ of their parents. The children were told that while they should always be ashamed of their traitorous blood, they could go a long way towards ‘washing away’ their inherent sinfulness by working hard, obeying the guards and informing on their parents. The tenth rule of Camp 14 said that a prisoner ‘must truly’ consider each guard as his teacher. That made sense to Shin. As a child and teenager, his parents were exhausted, distant and uncommunicative.

  Shin was a scrawny, incurious and for the most part friendless child whose one source of certainty was the guards’ lectures about redemption through snitching. His understanding of right and wrong, though, was often muddied by encounters he witnessed between his mother and the camp guards.

  When he was ten, Shin left his house one evening and went looking for his mother. He was hungry and it was time for her to prepare dinner. He walked to a nearby rice field where his mother worked and asked a woman if she had seen her.

  ‘She’s cleaning the bowijidowon’s room,’ the woman told him, referring to the office of the guard in charge of the rice farm.

  Shin walked to the guard’s office and found the front door locked. He peeked through a window on the side of the building. His mother was on her knees cleaning the floor. As Shin watched, the bowijidowon came into view. He approached Shin’s mother from behind and began to grope her. She offered no resistance. Both of them removed their clothes. Shin watched them have sex.

  He never asked his mother about what he saw, and he never mentioned it to his father.

  That same year, students in Shin’s class at primary school were required to volunteer to help t
heir parents at work. He joined his mother one morning to plant rice seedlings. She seemed unwell and fell behind in her planting. Shortly before the lunch break, her slack pace caught the eye of a guard.

  ‘You bitch,’ he shouted at her.

  ‘Bitch’ was the standard form of address when camp guards spoke to female prisoners, while Shin and the other male prisoners were called sons of bitches.

  ‘How are you able to stuff your face when you can’t even plant rice?’ the guard asked.

  She apologized, but the guard grew increasingly angry.

  ‘This bitch won’t do,’ he shouted.

  As Shin stood beside his mother, the guard invented a punishment for her.

  ‘Go kneel on that ridge there and raise your arms. Stay in that position until I come back from lunch.’

  Shin’s mother knelt on the ridge in the sun for an hour and a half, arms reaching for the sky. The boy stood nearby and watched. He did not know what to say to her so he said nothing.

  When the guard returned, he ordered Shin’s mother back to work. Weak and hungry, she passed out in the middle of the afternoon. Shin ran to the guard, begging him for help. Other workers dragged his mother to a shaded rest area, where she regained consciousness.

  That evening, Shin went with his mother to an ‘ideological struggle’ meeting, a compulsory gathering for self-criticism. Shin’s mother again fell to her knees at the meeting as forty of her fellow farm workers followed the bowijidowon’s lead and berated her for failing to fill her work quota.

  On summer nights, Shin and some of the other small boys in his village would sneak into the orchard just north of the cluster of concrete dwellings where they lived. They picked unripe pears and cucumbers and ate them as quickly as they could. When they were caught, guards would beat them with batons and ban them from lunch at school for several days.

  Guards, though, did not care if Shin and his friends ate rats, frogs, snakes and insects. They were intermittently abundant in the sprawling camp, which used few pesticides, relied on human waste as fertilizer, and supplied no water for cleaning privies or taking baths.