Escape from Camp 14 (9 page)

Except for him.

Perhaps because he was a proven snitch, camp authorities sent him back to school. But his return wasn’t easy.

Trouble started as soon as Shin walked from the execution grounds to his school, where he had a private meeting with his teacher. Shin had known this man for two years (although he never learned
his name) and regarded him as relatively fair-minded, at least by camp standards.

At the meeting, though, the teacher was seething. He wanted to know why Shin had tipped off the school’s night guard about the escape plot.

‘Why didn’t you come to me first?’ he shouted.

‘I wanted to, but I couldn’t find you,’ Shin replied, explaining that it was late at night and the teachers’ compound was off-limits to prisoners.

‘You could have waited until the morning,’ the teacher said.

The teacher had not received any credit from his superiors for uncovering the escape plot, and he blamed this miscarriage of justice on Shin, warning the boy that he would pay for his
thoughtlessness. When Shin’s class – about thirty-five students – assembled later in the classroom, the teacher pointed at Shin and shouted, ‘Come up front.
Kneel!’

Shin knelt on the concrete floor for nearly six hours. When he wiggled to ease his discomfort, the teacher whacked him with a blackboard pointer.

On his second day back at school, Shin walked with his class to a camp farm to gather corn straw and haul it to a threshing floor. Shin pulled an A-frame carrier loaded with straw. It was
relatively light work compared to pushing coal carts, but it required that he wear a kind of harness with a leather strap that chafed the tender scars on his lower back and tailbone.

Soon, blood was oozing down his legs, soaking the pants of his school uniform.

Shin dared not complain. His teacher had warned him that he would need to work harder than his classmates to wash away the sins of his mother and brother.

At school and during field work, all students had to ask permission to urinate or defecate. When Shin made his first bathroom request after his release from prison, his teacher said no. Shin
tried to hold it during the school day, but ended up peeing his pants a couple of times a week, usually when he and other students were working outside. Since it was winter and very cold, he worked
in pants stiff with urine.

Shin had known most of his classmates since they were seven years old and started primary school together. He was smaller than most of the boys in his class, but they had usually treated him as
a peer. Now, taking their cue from the teacher, they began to taunt and bully him.

They snatched away his food, punched him in the stomach and called him names. Almost all the names were elaborations on ‘reactionary son of a bitch’.

Shin is not certain if his classmates knew he had betrayed his mother and brother. He believes that his childhood friend, Hong, did not tell anyone. In any case, Shin was never teased for having
betrayed his family. That would have been an unpatriotic and risky schoolyard taunt, since all students were under orders from teachers and guards to inform on their families and on each other.

Before his time in prison, Shin had managed to make a strategic classroom alliance. He had become friends with Hong Joo Hyun, the grade leader. (This was the job Shin had tried
to win on the night he snitched on his family.) Hong led students on work details and was authorized by the teacher to hit and kick classmates he regarded as shirkers. He was also the
teacher’s most trusted informer.

Hong himself could be beaten or denied meals if the class dithered during field work and failed to meet quotas. His position was similar to adult prisoners known as
jagubbanjang
, or crew
managers. Guards gave these managers, who were always male and tended to be physically imposing, virtually unchecked authority over their fellow prisoners. Since the managers had to answer for any
failures by their crews, they were often more vigilant, brutal and unforgiving than camp guards.

After Shin’s mother and brother were executed, Hong began to watch Shin carefully. During a road repair assignment, he noticed that Shin had loaded far too many stones in a handcart. Shin
tried again and again to push the cart, but it was too heavy for the emaciated boy to budge.

When Shin saw his grade leader approaching with a shovel, he initially expected some help. He thought that Hong would order other students to pitch in and roll the cart. Instead, Hong swung his
shovel and struck Shin in the back, knocking him to the ground.

‘Pull your handcart correctly,’ Hong said.

He kicked Shin in the side of the head and told him to stand up. As Shin struggled to get to his feet, Hong again swung his shovel and mashed Shin’s nose, which began to bleed.

After that beating, students who were younger and smaller than Shin began to insult his mother. With the encouragement of the teacher, they called him names and punched him.

Owing to his confinement in the underground cell, Shin had lost much of his strength and nearly all of his endurance. His return to hard labour, long hours and skimpy meals at school made him
almost insanely hungry.

In the school cafeteria, he scrounged constantly for spilled cabbage soup, dipping his hand in cold dirty soup that had spilled on the floor and licking his fingers clean. He searched floors,
roads and fields for grains of rice, beans, or cow dung that contained undigested kernels of corn.

On a morning work detail in December, a couple of weeks after his return to school, Shin discovered a dried-up ear of corn in a pile of straw and devoured it. Hong Joo Hyun was nearby. He ran
over to Shin, grabbed him by the hair, and dragged him to their nearby teacher.

‘Teacher, instead of working, Shin is just scavenging for food.’

As Shin fell to his knees to beg for forgiveness (a ritual abasement that he performed as a matter of instinct), his teacher hit him on the head with his walking stick and shouted for the rest
of the class to help punish the scavenger.

‘Come here and slap him,’ the teacher said.

Shin knew what was coming. He had slapped and punched many of his classmates in a round-robin of collective punishment. Students queued up in front of Shin. Girls slapped him on the right cheek,
boys on the left. Shin believes they went through five rotations before the teacher said it was time for lunch.

Before his confinement in the secret prison and before his teacher and schoolmates began picking on him, Shin hadn’t thought to blame anyone for his birth inside Camp
14.

His blinkered existence kept him focused on finding food and avoiding beatings. He was indifferent to the outside world, to his parents and to the history of his family. As much as he believed
in anything, he believed the guards’ preaching about original sin. As the offspring of traitors, his one chance at redemption – and his only way of averting starvation – was hard
work.

Back at school, however, he bristled with resentment. He was not yet hobbled by guilt about his mother and brother – that would come much later – but his months in the cell with
Uncle had lifted, if only slightly, a curtain on the world beyond the fence.

Shin had become conscious of what he could never eat or see. The filth, stink and bleakness of the camp crushed his spirit. As he became marginally self-aware, he discovered loneliness, regret
and longing.

Most of all, he was angry with both his parents. His mother’s scheming, he believed, had triggered his torture. He blamed her, too, for the abuse and humiliation dished out by his teacher
and classmates. He despised both his mother and father for selfishly breeding in a labour camp, for producing offspring doomed to die behind barbed wire.

Out on the execution grounds, in the moments after Shin’s mother and brother were killed, Shin’s father had tried to comfort the boy.

‘You OK? Are you hurt anywhere? Did you see your mother in there?’ his father asked repeatedly, referring to the underground prison.

Shin was too angry to reply.

After the execution, he even found it distasteful to say the word ‘father’. On his rare days off from school – about fourteen days a year – Shin was expected to go and
see his father. During the visits, Shin would often refuse to speak.

His father tried to apologize.

‘I know you’re suffering because you have the wrong parents,’ he told Shin. ‘You were unlucky to be born to us. What can you do? Things just turned out this
way.’

Suicide is a powerful temptation for North Koreans plucked out of ordinary lives and subjected to the labour camps’ regime of hard labour, hunger, beatings and sleep
deprivation.

‘Suicide was not uncommon in the camp,’ Kang Cholhwan wrote in his memoir about the decade he spent inside Camp 15. ‘A number of our neighbours took that road . . . They
usually left behind letters criticizing the regime, or at the very least its Security Force . . . Truth be told, some form of punishment would await the family regardless of whether or not a
critical note were left behind. It was a rule that admitted no exceptions. The Party saw suicide as an attempt to escape its grasp, and if the individual who had tried the trick wasn’t around
to pay for it, someone else needed to be found.’
¹

North Korea’s National Security Agency warns all prisoners that suicide will be punished with longer sentences for surviving relatives, according to the Korean Bar Association in
Seoul.

In his memoir about the six years he spent in two of the camps, Kim Yong, a former lieutenant colonel in the North Korean army, says the appeal of suicide was ‘overwhelming’.

‘Prisoners were beyond the point of feeling hungry, so they felt constantly delirious,’ wrote Kim, who said he spent two years at Camp 14 until he was transferred across the Taedong
River to Camp 18, a political prison where guards were less brutal and prisoners had slightly more freedom.

Trying to end the delirium he felt in Camp 14, Kim said he jumped down a coal-mine shaft. After tumbling to the bottom of the mine, badly injured, he felt more disappointment than pain: ‘I
regretted that I could not find a better way to really put an end to this indescribable torment.’
²

As wretched as Shin’s life became after the execution of his mother and brother, suicide for him was never more than a passing thought.

There was a fundamental difference, in his view, between prisoners who arrived from the outside and those who were born in the camp: many outsiders, shattered by the contrast between a
comfortable past and a punishing present, could not find or maintain the will to survive. A perverse benefit of birth in the camp was a complete absence of expectations.

And so Shin’s misery never skidded into complete hopelessness. He had no hope to lose, no past to mourn, no pride to defend. He did not find it degrading to lick soup off the floor. He was
not ashamed to beg a guard for forgiveness. It didn’t trouble his conscience to betray a friend for food. These were merely survival skills, not motives for suicide.

Teachers at Shin’s school rarely rotated to other jobs. In the seven years since he’d entered school, he had known only two teachers. But four months after the
execution, Shin had a break. One morning, the teacher who tormented him – and who encouraged his classmates to do likewise – was gone.

His replacement gave no outward indications that he would be any less abusive. Like nearly every guard in the camp, he was a nameless, bullish-looking man in his early thirties who demanded that
students avert their eyes and bow their heads when they spoke to him. Shin remembers him being just as cold, distant and domineering as the others.

The new teacher, though, did not seem to want Shin to die of malnutrition.

By March 1997, about four months after his release from the underground prison, starvation had become a real possibility for Shin. Harassed by his teacher and fellow students, he could not find
enough nourishment to maintain his weight. He also could not seem to recover from his burns. His scars still bled. He grew weaker and often failed to complete his work assignments, which led to
more beatings, less food, more bleeding.

The new teacher took Shin to the cafeteria after mealtimes, where he told the boy to eat whatever leftovers he could find. He sometimes sneaked food to Shin. He also assigned him less arduous
work and made certain that Shin had a warm place to sleep on the floor of the student dormitory.

Just as importantly, the new teacher prevented Shin’s classmates from hitting him and stealing his food. The taunting about his dead mother ended. Hong Joo Hyun, the class leader who had
struck him in the face with a shovel, became his friend again. Shin put on some weight. The burns on his back finally healed.

Perhaps the teacher felt pity for a picked-on child who had watched his mother die. It is also possible that senior guards in the camp had found out that a disgruntled teacher was mistreating a
reliable snitch. Perhaps the replacement teacher was ordered to keep the boy alive.

Why the new teacher made the effort, Shin never knew. But Shin is certain that without his help he would have died.

Tractors hauled food to the work site every day. There were heaps of milled corn and steaming vats of cabbage soup.

Shin was fifteen and working alongside thousands of prisoners. It was 1998 and they were building a hydroelectric dam on the Taedong River, which forms the southern border of Camp 14. The
project was urgent enough to warrant filling the stomachs of slave labourers three times a day. Guards also allowed workers – about five thousand adult prisoners and a couple of hundred
students from the camp’s secondary school – to catch fish and frogs from the river.

For the first time in his life, Shin ate well for an entire year.

The North Korean government had decided that the camp, with its high-voltage fence and factories that churned out military uniforms, glassware and cement, needed a reliable local source of
electricity, and fast.

‘Hey! Hey! Hey! It’s falling! Falling!’