Escape from Camp 14 (7 page)

Shin took off his sandals and tucked his bare feet underneath him on the hotel sofa. I turned on a tape recorder. The sound of morning traffic filtered into the room from Torrance Boulevard.
Shin fidgeted with the buttons on his mobile phone.

‘So what’s up?’ I asked.

Shin said he had been lying about his mother’s escape. He invented the lie just before arriving in South Korea.

‘There were a lot of things I needed to hide,’ he said. ‘I was terrified of a backlash, of people asking me, “Are you even human?”’

‘It has been a burden to keep this inside. In the beginning, I didn’t think much of my lie. It was my intent to lie. Now the people around me make me want to be honest. They make me
want to be more moral. In that sense, I felt like I need to tell the truth. I now have friends who are honest. I have begun to understand what honesty is. I feel extreme guilt for everything.

‘I was more faithful to the guards than to my family. We were each other’s spies. I know by telling the truth, people will look down on me.

‘Outsiders have a wrong understanding of the camp. It is not just the soldiers who beat us. It is the prisoners themselves who are not kind to each other. There is no sense of community. I
am one of those mean prisoners.’

Shin said he did not expect forgiveness for what he was about to disclose. He said he had not forgiven himself. He also seemed to be trying to do something more than expiate guilt. He wanted to
explain – in a way that he acknowledged would damage his credibility as a witness – how the camp had warped his character.

He said that if outsiders could understand what political prison camps have done, and are doing, to children born inside the fence, it would redeem his lie and his life.

This story begins a day earlier, on the afternoon of Friday, 5 April 1996.

As school wound down for the day, Shin’s teacher surprised him. He told Shin that he did not have to spend the night in the dormitory. He could go home and eat supper with his mother.

The teacher was rewarding Shin for good behaviour. After two years in the dormitory, he had begun to figure a few things out. He was less often a laggard, less often beaten, more often a
snitch.

Shin did not particularly want to spend the night at his mother’s place. Living apart had not improved their relationship. He still didn’t trust her to take care of him; she still
seemed tense in his presence. The teacher, however, told him to go home. So he went.

As unexpected as it had been for him to be sent home, there was a bigger surprise when he got there. His brother, Shin He Geun, had come home too. He worked at the camp’s cement factory,
located several miles away in the far southeast of the camp. Shin barely knew and rarely saw Shin He Geun, who had been out of the house for a decade and was now twenty-one.

All that Shin knew about his brother was that he was not a hard worker. He had rarely been granted permission to leave the factory to see his parents. For him to be in his mother’s house,
Shin thought, he must have finally done something right.

Shin’s mother was not delighted when her youngest son showed up unexpectedly for supper. She did not say welcome or that she had missed him.

Then she cooked, using her daily ration of seven hundred grams of corn meal to make porridge in the one pot she owned. With bowls and spoons, she and her sons ate on the kitchen floor. After he
had eaten, Shin went to sleep in the bedroom.

Some time later, voices from the kitchen woke him up. He peeked through the bedroom door, curious about what his mother and brother were up to.

His mother was cooking rice. For Shin, this was a slap in the face. He had been served a watery corn soup, the same tasteless gruel he had eaten every day of his life. Now his brother was
getting rice.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of rice in North Korean culture. It signifies wealth, evokes the closeness of family and sanctifies a proper meal. Labour camp prisoners almost never
eat rice and its absence is a daily reminder of the normality they can never have.

Outside the camp, too, chronic shortages have removed rice from the daily diets of many North Koreans, especially those in the hostile classes. Teenage defectors from the North, when they arrive
in South Korea, have told government counsellors of a recurring dream: they are sitting at a table with their families, eating warm rice. Among the elite in Pyongyang, one of the most coveted
signifiers of status is an electric rice cooker.

As Shin watched his mother cook, he guessed she must have stolen the rice, a few grains at a time, from the farm where she worked and secreted it away in her house.

In the bedroom, Shin fumed.

He also listened.

His brother was doing most of the talking. Shin heard that Shin He Geun had not been given the day off. Without permission, he had walked away from the cement factory, where he had apparently
done something wrong.

Shin realized his brother was in trouble and that he would probably be punished when the guards caught up with him. His mother and brother were discussing what they should do.

Escape.

Shin was astonished to hear his brother say the word. He was planning to run. His mother was helping him and her precious hoard of rice was food for the flight.

Shin did not hear his mother say that she intended to go along. But she was not trying to argue her eldest into staying, even though she knew that if he escaped or died trying she and others in
her family would be tortured and probably killed. Every prisoner knew the first rule of Camp 14, subsection 2: ‘Any witness to an attempted escape who fails to report it will be shot
immediately.’

His mother did not sound alarmed, but Shin was. His heart pounded. He was angry that she would put his life at risk for the sake of his older brother. He was afraid he would be implicated in the
escape and shot.

He was also jealous that his brother was getting rice.

On the floor of his mother’s bedroom, as the aggrieved thirteen-year-old struggled to contain his fear, Shin’s camp-bred instincts took over: he had to tell a guard. He got up off
the floor, went into the kitchen and headed out the door.

‘Where are you going?’ his mother asked.

‘To the toilet,’ he said.

Shin ran back to his school. It was one in the morning. He entered the school dormitory. His teacher had gone home to the gated Bowiwon village.

Who could he tell?

In the crowded dormitory room where his class slept, Shin found his friend Hong Sung Jo and woke him up.

Shin trusted this boy as much as he trusted anyone.

Shin told him what his mother and brother were planning and asked for advice. Hong told him to tell the school’s night guard. They went together. As they walked to the guard’s office
in the main school building, Shin thought of a way to profit from his information.

The guard was awake and in uniform. He told both boys to come inside his office.

‘I need to say something to you,’ Shin told the guard, whom he did not know. ‘But before I do, I want to get something in return.’

The guard assured Shin that he would help.

‘I want a guarantee of more food,’ Shin said.

Shin’s second demand was that he be named grade leader at school, a position that would allow him to work less and not be beaten as often.

The guard guaranteed Shin that his requests would be granted.

Accepting the guard’s word, Shin explained what his brother and mother were planning and where they were. The guard telephoned his superiors. He told Shin and Hong to go back to the
dormitory and get some sleep. He would take care of everything.

On the morning after he betrayed his mother and brother, uniformed men did come to the schoolyard for Shin.

Just as he wrote in his memoir, and as he told everyone in South Korea, he was handcuffed, blindfolded, pushed into the backseat of a jeep and driven away in silence to an underground prison
inside the camp.

But Shin knew why he had been summoned. And the guards in charge of Camp 14, he expected, knew he had tipped them off.

‘Do you know why you are here?’

Shin knew what he had done; he had followed camp rules and stopped an escape.

But the officer did not know, or did not care, that Shin had been a dutiful informer.

‘At dawn today, your mother and your brother were caught trying to escape. That’s why you’re here. Understand? Were you aware of this fact or not? How is it possible for you
not to know that your mother and brother tried to run away? If you want to live, you should spit out the truth.’

Confused and increasingly frightened, Shin found it difficult to speak. He was an informant. He could not understand why he was being interrogated as an accomplice.

Shin would eventually figure out that the night guard at the school had claimed all the credit for discovering the escape plan. When reporting to his superiors, he had not mentioned Shin’s
role.

But on that morning in the underground prison, Shin understood nothing. He was a bewildered thirteen-year-old. The officer with four stars kept asking him about the whys, whens and hows of his
family’s escape plan. Shin was unable to say anything coherent.

Finally, the officer pushed some papers across his desk.

‘In that case, bastard, read this and affix your thumbprint at the bottom.’

The document was a family rap sheet. It listed the names, ages and crimes of Shin’s father and of his father’s eleven brothers.

The eldest brother, Shin Tae Sub, was listed first. Next to his name was a date: 1951, the second year of the Korean War. On the same line, Shin saw his uncle’s crimes: disruption of
public peace, acts of brutality and defection to the South. The same offences were listed beside the name of Shin’s second oldest uncle.

It took Shin many months to understand what he had been allowed to see. The papers explained why his father’s family had been locked up in Camp 14.

The unforgivable crime Shin’s father had committed was being the brother of two young men who had fled south during a fratricidal war that razed much of the Korean Peninsula and divided
hundreds of thousands of families. Shin’s unforgivable crime was being his father’s son. Shin’s father had never explained any of this.

His father later told Shin about the day in 1965 when the family was taken away by the security forces. Before dawn, they forced their way into a house owned by Shin’s grandfather in
Mundok County in South Pyongan Province. It’s a fertile farming area located about thirty-five miles north of the capital, Pyongyang. ‘Pack your things,’ the armed men shouted.
They did not explain why the family was being arrested or where they were going. At daybreak, a truck showed up for their belongings. The family travelled for an entire day (a distance of about
forty-five miles on mountain roads) before arriving at Camp 14.

As ordered, Shin put his thumbprint on the document.

Guards blindfolded him again, led him out of the interrogation room and marched him down a corridor. When they pulled away the blindfold, Shin read the number seven on a cell door. Guards pushed
him inside and tossed him a prison uniform.

‘Hey, son of a bitch, change into this.’

The uniform would have fitted a large adult. When Shin pulled it over his short, bony frame, he disappeared into what felt like a burlap sack.

Shin’s cell was a concrete square, barely large enough for him to lie down. It had a toilet in the corner and a sink with running water. The light bulb hanging from the ceiling was on when
Shin entered the cell and it could not be turned off. Without windows, Shin could not distinguish night from day. There were two thin blankets on the floor. He was given nothing to eat and could
not sleep.

He believes it was the next day when guards opened the door, blindfolded him and led him to a second interrogation room, where two new officers were waiting. They ordered Shin to kneel and
pressed him to explain why his family wanted to escape. What grudges did his mother harbour? What did he discuss with her? What were his brother’s intentions?

Shin said he did not have answers to their questions.

‘You haven’t lived but a few years,’ one of the guards told Shin. ‘Just confess and go out and live. Would you like to die in here?’

‘I . . . really don’t know anything,’ he replied.

He was increasingly frightened, increasingly hungry and still struggling to understand why the guards did not know he was the one who had tipped them off.

The guards sent him back to his cell.

On what seemed to be the morning of the third day, one of his interrogators and three other guards entered Shin’s cell. They shackled his ankles, tied a rope to a hook in the ceiling and
hung him upside down. Then they left and locked the door – all without a word.

His feet almost touched the ceiling. His head was suspended about two feet above the floor. Reaching out with his hands, which the guards had left untied, Shin could not quite touch the floor.
He squirmed and swung around, trying to right himself, but could not. His neck cramped and his ankles hurt. Eventually his legs went numb. His head, flushed with blood, ached more with each
hour.

The guards did not return until evening. They untied the boy and left, again without a word. Food arrived in his cell, but Shin found it almost impossible to eat. He could not move his fingers,
and his ankles were gouged and bleeding from the sharp steel edges of the shackles.

On the fourth day, the interrogators wore civilian clothes, not uniforms.

After being blindfolded and marched from his cell, Shin met them in a dimly lit room with a high ceiling. It had the look of a machine shop.

A chain dangled from a winch on the ceiling. Hooks on the walls held a hammer, axe, pliers and clubs of various shapes and sizes. On a wide shop table, Shin saw a large pair of pincers, a tool
used for gripping and carrying pieces of hot metal.

‘How is it, being in this room?’ one of the interrogators asked.