Escape from Camp 14 (10 page)

Shin shouted the warning. He was hauling platters of wet concrete to the crew when he noticed that a freshly poured concrete wall had cracked and was beginning to collapse. Beneath it, a crew of
eight was finishing another wall.

He screamed as loudly as he could. But it was too late.

All the workers – three adults, along with three fifteen-year-old girls and two fifteen-year-old boys – were killed. Several were crushed beyond recognition. The supervising guard
did not halt work after the accident. At the end of the shift, he simply ordered Shin and other workers to dispose of the bodies.

The mountains of North Korea are crisscrossed with swift rivers, large and small. Their hydropower potential is such that ninety per cent of the electricity on the Korean
Peninsula prior to partition came from the North.
¹

But under the Kim family dynasty, the North Korean government has failed to build or maintain a reliable national electricity grid linked to hydroelectric dams, many of which are located in
remote areas. When the Soviet Union stopped supplying cheap fuel oil in the early 1990s, city-based, oil-powered generators sputtered to a halt and the lights went out across much of the country.
Most of the time, they are still out.

Satellite photographs of the Korean Peninsula at night show a black hole between China and South Korea. There is not enough power in the country even to keep the lights on in Pyongyang, where
the government tries to pamper the elite. In February 2008, when I travelled for three days and two nights to Pyongyang as part of a large delegation of foreign journalists to cover a performance
by the New York Philharmonic, the government managed to turn on the lights in much of the city. When the orchestra and the press left town, the lights went out again.

It makes sense, then, that the construction of small- and medium-sized hydroelectric plants, capable of serving local industry and built mostly by hand, using basic technology, has been a
priority since the 1990s. In a frenzy of hard labour, thousands have been built.

Besides staving off economic collapse, the dams are ideologically beguiling to the family that runs the country. As his hagiographers tell the story, Kim Il Sung’s most important
intellectual achievement – his brilliant
juche
idea – asserts that national pride goes hand in glove with self-reliance.

As the Great Leader explained it:

None of this, of course, is even remotely possible in a country as ill-governed as North Korea. It has always depended on handouts from foreign governments, and if these end,
the Kim dynasty would probably collapse. Even in the best of years, it cannot feed itself. North Korea has no oil, and its economy has never been able to generate enough cash to buy sufficient fuel
or food on the world market.

North Korea would have lost the Korean War and disappeared as a state without the help of the Chinese, who fought the United States and other Western forces to a stalemate. Until the 1990s,
North Korea’s economy was largely held together by subsidies from the Soviet Union. From 2000 to 2008, South Korea propped up the North – and bought itself a measure of peaceful
coexistence – with huge unconditional gifts of fertilizer and food, along with generous investment.

Since then, Pyongyang has become increasingly dependent on China for concessional trade, food aid and fuel. A telling measure of China’s growing influence is that in the months prior to
Kim Jong Eun’s official emergence in 2010 as the chosen successor to Kim Jong Il, the ailing elder Kim travelled twice to Beijing, where diplomats say he asked for China to bless his
succession plan.

Reality notwithstanding, North Korea champions self-reliance as the
sine qua non
of the country’s much-advertised goal of becoming ‘a great, prosperous and powerful
nation’ by 2012, the one-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Kim Il Sung.

To that fantastical end, the government regularly enlists the masses in miserable tasks dressed up in noble slogans. The propaganda can be quite creative: the famine was repackaged as the
‘Arduous March’, a patriotic struggle that North Koreans were encouraged to win with the inspiring slogan: ‘Let’s Eat Two Meals Per Day’.

In the spring of 2010, as food shortages again became severe, the government launched a massive back-to-the-farm campaign to persuade city dwellers to move to the countryside and raise crops.
These urbanites were to be permanent reinforcements for ‘rice-planting combat’, the annual campaign that sends office workers, students and soldiers to the country-side for two months
in the spring and two weeks in the fall. In the winter, city people are charged with collecting their faeces – and that of their neighbours – for spring planting.

Other urgent and patriotic tasks that North Koreans have been urged to shoulder include ‘Let’s Breed More High-Yielding Fish!’ ‘Let’s Expand Goat Rearing and Create
More Grassland in Accordance with the Party!’ and ‘Let’s Grow More Sunflowers!’ The success of these hortatory campaigns has been mixed, at best, especially when it comes to
the government’s highly unpopular efforts to lure city-bred people into back-breaking farm labour.

For the dam project inside Camp 14 there were no such problems with motivation.

As Shin witnessed it, soon after the guards announced a new ‘rally of endeavour’ to build a hydroelectric dam, thousands of adult prisoners marched from factories to makeshift
dormitories erected near the north bank of the Taedong. Shin and his classmates moved out of their school dormitory. They all worked, ate and slept at the dam site, which was located about six
miles southeast of the centre of the camp.

Labour on the dam, which satellite photographs show to be a substantial concrete structure spanning a wide river, with turbines and spillways hugging the northern bank, continued round the
clock. Trucks hauled in cement, sand and rock. Shin saw only one diesel-powered excavator. Most of the digging and construction was done by workers using shovels, buckets and bare hands.

Shin had seen prisoners die in the camp before – of hunger, illness, beatings and at public executions – but not as a routine part of work.

The greatest loss of life at the dam occurred soon after fullscale construction began. A rainy season flash flood rolled down the Taedong in July 1998, sweeping away hundreds of dam workers and
students. Shin watched them disappear from a perch on the riverbank where he was hauling sand. He was quickly put to work confirming the identities of dead students and burying their bodies.

On the third day after the flood, he remembers carrying the bloated body of a girl on his back. At first it was slack, but it soon became stiff, with rigid arms and legs splayed outward. To
squeeze the body into a narrow, hand-dug grave, he had to push the limbs together.

Floodwaters stripped some drowned students of their clothes. When Hong Joo Hyun discovered a naked classmate amid the post-flood debris, he removed his own clothes and covered the body.

As the clean-up continued, Shin competed with many other students to find bodies. For each corpse they buried, guards rewarded them with one or two servings of rice.

The Taedong, as it flowed past Camp 14, was too wide and swift to freeze in the North Korean winter, allowing dam construction to continue year round. In December 1998, Shin
was ordered to wade into the river’s shallows to pick up boulders. Unable to bear the cold and without the approval of his guard, he joined several other students who tried to wade out.

‘You come out of the water and I’ll starve you all, understand!’ their guard shouted.

Shivering uncontrollably, Shin kept working.

Students worked primarily as bottom-rung labourers. They often carried steel reinforcing rods to older workmen who tied them together with twine or wire as the dam rose from the riverbed in a
chequerboard pattern of concrete blocks. None of the students had gloves, and in winter their hands often stuck to the cold rods. Handing over a ‘rebar’ sometimes meant ripping skin
from one’s palms and fingers.

Shin remembers that when one of his classmates, Byun Soon Ho, complained about a fever and feeling unwell, a guard gave him a lesson in the benefits of stoicism.

‘Soon Ho, stick out your tongue,’ the guard said.

He ordered the boy to press his tongue to a freezing rebar. Nearly an hour later, Soon Ho, tears in his eyes, his mouth oozing blood, managed to detach his tongue.

Working at the dam was dangerous, but Shin also found it exhilarating.

The primary reason was food. It was not particularly tasty, but month in, month out there was lots of it. Shin remembers mealtimes at the dam site as the happiest moments of his teen years. He
regained all the weight and stamina he had lost in the underground prison, he could keep up at work and he became confident in his ability to survive.

Living near the dam also gave Shin a small measure of independence. In the summer, hundreds of students slept outdoors under a canopy. When they were not working, they could walk – during
daylight hours – anywhere inside the sprawl of Camp 14. For his hard work, Shin earned a recommendation from his grade leader that allowed him to leave the dam site for four overnight visits
to his father. Since they were not reconciled, Shin spent just one night with him.

He had worked at the dam for about a year when his time at secondary school came to an end in May 1999. The school had been little more than slave quarters from which he was sent out as a rock
picker, weed puller and dam labourer, but graduation meant that, at the age of sixteen, he had become an adult worker. He was ready to be assigned to a permanent job inside the camp.

About sixty per cent of Shin’s class was assigned to the coal mines, where accidental death from cave-ins, explosions and gas poisonings was common. Many miners developed black lung
disease after ten to fifteen years of working underground. Most miners died in their forties, if not before. As Shin understood it, an assignment in the mines was a death sentence.

The decision about who went where was made by Shin’s teacher, the man who two years earlier had saved Shin’s life by providing him with extra food and halting abuse from his
classmates. The teacher handed down assignments without explanation, curtly telling students where they would spend the rest of their lives. As soon as the teacher made his announcements, new
masters – foremen from camp factories, mines and farms – came to the school and led the students away.

The teacher told Hong Joo Hyun that he was going to the mines. Shin never saw him again.

The girl who lost her big toe in the mines at the age of eleven, Moon Sung Sim, was assigned to the textile factory.

Hong Sung Jo, the friend who saved Shin from his torturers by confirming that he’d informed on his mother and brother, was also sent to the mines. Shin never saw him again, either.

If there was a rationale behind the assignments, Shin never understood it. He thinks it came down to the personal whim of the teacher, who was consistently unreadable. Perhaps the teacher liked
Shin. Perhaps he pitied him. Maybe he had been ordered to look out for the boy. Shin just doesn’t know.

In any case, the teacher again saved his life. He assigned him to a permanent job at Camp 14’s pig farm, where two hundred men and women raised about eight hundred pigs, along with goats,
rabbits, chickens and a few cows. Feed for the animals was grown in fields surrounding the livestock pens.

‘Shin In Geun, you’re assigned to the ranch,’ the teacher told him. ‘Work hard.’

Nowhere else in Camp 14 was there so much food to steal.

Shin did not work hard.

The foremen would sometimes beat him and other workers who performed poorly, but not seriously and never to death. The pig farm was as good as it got for Shin at Camp 14. He even sneaked the
occasional mid-afternoon nap.

Mealtime portions in the farm’s cafeteria were no larger than at the cement factory, the textile mill, or the mines. Nor was the food any better. But between meals, Shin could help himself
to ground corn intended for the piglets he fed between November and July. Out in the fields, where he weeded and harvested from August to October, he snacked on corn, cabbage and other vegetables.
On occasion, the foremen would bring a cooking pot out to the fields and everyone could eat his or her fill.

The farm was located up in the mountains, away from the river, about half an hour’s walk from Shin’s former school and the house where he had lived with his mother. Women with
children walked back and forth to the farm from family housing, but most of the farm workers stayed in a dormitory on the mountain.

Shin slept there on the floor in a room for men. Bullying was not a problem. He did not have to fight for a warm patch of concrete. He slept well.

There was a slaughterhouse on the farm where fifty or so pigs were butchered twice a year, exclusively for guards and their families. As a prisoner, Shin was not allowed to eat pork or the meat
of any livestock raised on the farm, but he and other prisoners could sometimes steal. The smell of roasting pork on the farm would alert guards, leading to beatings and weeks of half rations, so
they ate purloined pork raw.

What Shin did not do on the farm was think, talk, or dream about the outside world.

No one there mentioned the escape plan that had led to the execution of his mother and brother. The guards did not ask Shin to snitch on fellow workers. The anger that overwhelmed him in the
wake of his mother’s death receded into numbness. Before he was tortured, confined in the underground prison and exposed to Uncle’s stories about the world beyond the fence, Shin had
been uninterested in anything beyond his next meal.