Escape from Camp 14 (13 page)

At the border, North Korean authorities detained Park and his family. He tried to convince them that he wasn’t a defector and had merely been visiting family in China and was coming home
to vote, but the authorities did not buy it. They accused him of being a convert to Christianity and a spy for South Korea. After several rounds of interrogation, Park and his wife and son were
sent to Camp 14. Park was assigned to the camp’s textile factory in the autumn of 2004.

When Shin met him, Park was furious with himself for returning to North Korea. His foolishness had cost him his freedom and, as he told Shin, it would soon cost him his wife, who was divorcing
him. She came from a prominent family in Pyongyang with strong party connections, Park said, and she was trying to convince camp guards that she had been a loyal and submissive wife while her
husband was a political criminal.

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.

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 box
¹
: 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

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.