Escape from Camp 14 (2 page)

In perhaps the most celebrated of these stories,
Night
, by Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel, the thirteen-year-old narrator explains his torment with an account of the normal life that
existed before he and his family were packed aboard trains bound for Nazi death camps. Wiesel studied the Talmud daily. His father owned a store and watched over their village in Romania. His
grandfather was always present to celebrate the Jewish holidays. But after the boy’s entire family perished in the camps, Wiesel was left ‘alone, terribly alone in a world without God,
without man. Without love or mercy.’

Shin’s story of survival is different.

His mother beat him and his father, who was allowed by guards to sleep with his mother just five nights a year, ignored him. His brother was a stranger. Children in the camp were untrustworthy
and abusive. Before he learned anything else, Shin learned to survive by snitching on all of them.

Love and mercy and family were words without meaning. God did not disappear or die. Shin had never heard of him.

In a preface to
Night
, Wiesel wrote that an adolescent’s knowledge of death and evil ‘should be limited to what one discovers in literature’.

In Camp 14, Shin did not know literature existed. He saw only one book in the camp, a Korean grammar text, in the hands of a teacher who wore a guard’s uniform, carried a revolver on his
hip and beat one of his primary school classmates to death with a chalkboard pointer.

Unlike those who have survived a concentration camp, Shin had not been torn away from a civilized existence and forced to descend into hell. He was born and raised there. He accepted its values.
He called it home.

North Korea’s labour camps have now existed for twice as long as the Soviet Gulag and about twelve times longer than the Nazi concentration camps. There is no dispute
about where these camps are. High-resolution satellite photographs, accessible on Google Earth to anyone with an Internet connection, show vast fenced compounds sprawling through the rugged
mountains of North Korea.

The South Korean government estimates that there are about one hundred and fifty-four thousand prisoners in the camps, while the US State Department and several human rights groups have put the
number as high as two hundred thousand. After examining a decade of satellite images of the camps, Amnesty International noticed new construction inside the camps in 2011 and became concerned that
the inmate population was increasing, perhaps to short-circuit possible unrest as power began to shift from Kim Jong Il to his young and untried son.
¹

There are six camps, according to South Korea’s intelligence agency and human rights groups. The biggest is thirty-one miles long and twenty-five miles wide, an area larger than the city
of Los Angeles. Electrified, barbed-wire fences – reinforced by guard towers and patrolled by armed men – encircle most of the camps. Two of them, numbers 15 and 18, have re-education
zones where some fortunate detainees receive remedial instruction in the teachings of Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung. If prisoners memorize enough of these teachings and convince guards they are
loyal, they can be released, but they are monitored for the rest of their lives by state security. The remaining camps are ‘complete control districts’ where prisoners, who are called
‘irredeemables’,
²
are worked to death.

Shin’s camp, number 14, is a complete control district. By reputation it is the toughest of them all because of its particularly brutal working conditions, the vigilance of its guards and
the state’s unforgiving view of the seriousness of the crimes committed by its inmates, many of whom are purged officials from the ruling party, the government and the military, along with
their families. Established around 1959 in central North Korea – near Kaechon County in South Pyongan Province – Camp 14 holds an estimated fifteen thousand prisoners. About thirty
miles long and fifteen miles wide, it has farms, mines and factories threaded through steep mountain valleys.

Although Shin is the only person born in a labour camp to escape and tell his story, there are at least twenty-six other labour camp eyewitnesses who are now in the free world.
³
They include at least fifteen North Koreans who were imprisoned in Camp 15’s edification district, and who won their release and later turned up in South
Korea. Former guards from other camps have also found their way to South Korea. Kim Yong, a former North Korean lieutenant colonel from a privileged background in Pyongyang, spent six years in two
camps before escaping in a coal train.

A distillation of their testimony by the Korean Bar Association in Seoul paints a detailed picture of daily life in the camps. A few prisoners are publicly executed every year. Others are beaten
to death or secretly murdered by guards, who have almost complete license to abuse and rape prisoners. Most prisoners tend crops, mine coal, sew military uniforms, or make cement while subsisting
on a near-starvation diet of corn, cabbage and salt. They lose their teeth, their gums turn black, their bones weaken and, as they enter their forties, they hunch over at the waist. Issued a set of
clothes once or twice a year, they commonly work and sleep in filthy rags, living without soap, socks, gloves, underclothes, or toilet paper. Twelve- to fifteen-hour workdays are mandatory until
prisoners die, usually of malnutrition-related illnesses, before they turn fifty.
⁴
Although precise numbers are impossible to obtain, Western
governments and human rights groups estimate that hundreds of thousands of people have perished in these camps.

Most North Koreans are sent to the camps without any judicial process, and many die there without learning the charges against them. They are taken from their homes, usually at night, by the
Bowibu, the National Security Agency. Guilt by association is legal in North Korea. A wrongdoer is often imprisoned with his parents and children. Kim Il Sung laid down the law in 1972:
‘[E]nemies of class, whoever they are, their seed must be eliminated through three generations.’

My first encounter with Shin was at lunch in the winter of 2008. We met in a Korean restaurant in downtown Seoul. Talkative and hungry, he wolfed down several helpings of rice and beef. As he
ate, he told my translator and me what it was like to watch as his mother was hanged. He blamed her for his torture in the camp, and he went out of his way to say that he was still furious with
her. He said he had not been a ‘good son’, but would not explain why.

During his years in the camp he said he had never once heard the word ‘love’, certainly not from his mother, a woman he continued to despise, even in death. He had heard about the
concept of forgiveness in a South Korean church, but it confused him. To ask for forgiveness in Camp 14, he said, was ‘to beg not to be punished’.

He had written a memoir about the camp, but it had received little attention in South Korea. He was jobless, broke, behind on his rent and uncertain what to do next. The rules of Camp 14 had
prevented him, on pain of execution, from having intimate contact with a woman. He now wanted to find a proper girlfriend, but said he didn’t know how to begin looking for one.

After lunch, he took me to the small, sad apartment in Seoul that he could not afford. Although he would not look me in the eye, he showed me his chopped-off finger and his scarred back. He
allowed me to take his photograph. Despite all the hardship he had endured he still had a baby face. He was twenty-six years old – three years out of Camp 14.

I was fifty-six years old at that memorable lunch. As a correspondent for the
Washington Post
in Northeast Asia, I had been searching for more than a year for a story that could explain
how North Korea used repression to keep from falling apart.

Political implosion had become my specialty. For the
Post
and for the
New York Times
, I spent nearly three decades covering failed states in Africa, the collapse of communism in
Eastern Europe, the breakup of Yugoslavia and the slow-motion rot in Burma under the generals. From the outside looking in, North Korea seemed ripe – indeed, overripe – for the kind of
collapse I had witnessed elsewhere. In a part of the world where nearly everyone else was getting rich, its people were increasingly isolated, poor and hungry.

Still, the Kim family dynasty kept the lid on. Totalitarian repression preserved their basket-case state.

The problem with showing how they did it was lack of access. Elsewhere in the world, repressive states are not always successful in sealing their borders. I had been able to work openly in
Mengistu’s Ethiopia, Mobutu’s Congo and Milosevic’s Serbia, and had slipped in as a tourist to write about Burma.

North Korea was much more careful. Foreign reporters, especially Americans, were rarely allowed inside. I visited North Korea only once, saw what my minders wanted me to see and learned little.
If journalists entered illegally, they risked months or years of imprisonment as spies. To win release, they sometimes needed the help of a former American president.
⁵

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.