Escape from Camp 14 (3 page)

If North Korea does collapse, Shin may be correct in predicting that its leaders, fearing war crimes trials, will demolish the camps before investigators can get to them. As Kim Jong Il
explained, ‘We must envelope our environment in a dense fog to prevent our enemies from learning anything about us.’
⁶

To try to piece together what I could not see, I spent the better part of three years reporting about North Korea’s military, leadership, economy, food shortages and human rights abuses. I
interviewed scores of North Korean defectors, including three former inmates of Camp 15 and a former camp guard and driver who worked at four labour camps. I spoke to South Korean scholars and
technocrats who travel regularly inside North Korea, and I reviewed the growing body of scholarly research on and personal memoirs about the camps. In the United States, I conducted extended
interviews with Korean Americans who have become Shin’s closest friends.

In assessing Shin’s story, one should keep in mind that many others in the camps have endured similar or worse hardships. According to An Myeong Chul, a former camp guard and driver,
‘Shin had a relatively comfortable life by the standards of other children in the camps.’

By exploding nuclear bombs, attacking South Korea and cultivating a reputation for hair-trigger belligerence, the government of North Korea has stirred up a semi-permanent security emergency on
the Korean Peninsula.

When North Korea deigns to enter into international diplomacy, it has always succeeded in shoving human rights off the negotiating table. Crisis management, usually focused on nuclear weapons
and missiles, has dominated American dealings with the North.

The labour camps have been an afterthought.

‘Talking to them about the camps is something that has not been possible,’ David Straub, who worked in the State Department during the Clinton and Bush years as a senior official
responsible for North Korea policy, told me. ‘They go nuts when you talk about it.’

The camps have barely pricked the world’s collective conscience. In the United States, newspaper stories notwithstanding, ignorance of their existence remains widespread. For several years
in Washington, a handful of North Korean defectors and camp survivors gathered each spring on the Mall for speeches and marches. The Washington press corps paid little attention. Part of the reason
was language. Most of the defectors spoke only Korean. As important, in a media culture that feeds on celebrity, no movie star, pop idol or Nobel Prize winner stepped forward to demand that
outsiders invest emotionally in a distant issue that lacks good video footage.

‘Tibetans have the Dalai Lama and Richard Gere, Burmese have Aung San Suu Kyi, Darfurians have Mia Farrow and George Clooney,’ Suzanne Scholte, a long-time activist who brought camp
survivors to Washington, told me. ‘North Koreans have no one like that.’

Shin told me he does not deserve to speak for the tens of thousands still in the camps. He is ashamed of what he did to survive and escape. He has resisted learning English, in part because he
does not want to have to tell his story again and again in a language that might make him important. But he desperately wants the world to understand what North Korea has tried so diligently to
hide. His burden is a heavy one. No one else born and raised in the camps has escaped to explain what went on inside – what still goes on inside.

PART ONE

Shin and his mother lived in the best prisoner quarters Camp 14 had to offer: a ‘model village’ next to an orchard and just across from the field where his mother
was later hanged.

Each of the forty one-storey buildings in the village housed four families. Shin and his mother had their own room, where they slept side by side on a concrete floor. The four families shared a
common kitchen, which had a single bare light bulb. Electricity ran for two hours a day, from four to five in the morning and ten to eleven at night. Windows were made of grey vinyl too opaque to
see through. Rooms were heated in the Korean way by a coal fire in the kitchen with flues running under the bedroom floor. The camp had its own coal mines and coal for heating was readily
available.

There were no beds, chairs or tables. There was no running water. No bath or shower. Prisoners who wanted to bathe sometimes sneaked down to the river in the summer. About thirty families shared
a well for drinking water. They also shared a privy, which was divided in half for men and women. Defecating and urinating there was mandatory, as human waste was used as fertilizer on the camp
farm.

If Shin’s mother met her daily work quota, she could bring home food for that night and the following day. At four in the morning, she would prepare breakfast and lunch for her son and for
herself. Every meal was the same: corn porridge, pickled cabbage and cabbage soup. Shin ate this meal nearly every day for twenty-three years, unless he was denied food as punishment.

When he was still too young for school, his mother often left him alone in the house in the morning, and came back from the fields at midday for lunch. Shin was always hungry and he would eat
his lunch as soon as his mother left for work in the morning.

He also ate her lunch.

When she came back at midday and found nothing to eat, she would become furious and beat her son with a hoe, a shovel, anything that was close at hand. Some of the beatings were as violent as
those he later received from the guards.

Still, Shin took as much food as he could from his mother as often as he could. It did not occur to him that if he ate her lunch she would go hungry. Many years later, after she was dead and he
was living in the United States, he would tell me that he loved his mother. But that was in retrospect. That was after he had learned that a civilized child should love his mother. When he was in
the camp – depending upon her for all his meals, stealing her food, enduring her beatings – he saw her as competition for survival.

Her name was Jang Hye Gyung. Shin remembers her as small and slightly plump with powerful arms. She wore her hair cut short, like all women in the camp, and was required to cover her head with a
white cloth folded into a triangle that tied around the back of her neck. Shin discovered her birth date – 1 October 1950 – from a document he saw during his interrogation in the
underground prison.

She never talked to him about her past, her family, or why she was in the camp, and he never asked. His existence as her son had been arranged by the guards. They chose her and the man who
became Shin’s father as prizes for each other in a ‘reward’ marriage.

Single men and women slept in dormitories segregated by sex. The eighth rule of Camp 14, as Shin was required to memorize it, said, ‘Should sexual physical contact occur without prior
approval, the perpetrators will be shot immediately.’

Rules were the same in other North Korean labour camps. If unauthorized sex resulted in a pregnancy or a birth, the woman and her baby were usually killed, according to my interviews with a
former camp guard and several former prisoners. They said that women who had sex with guards in an attempt to get more food or easier work knew that the risks were high. If they became pregnant,
they disappeared.

A reward marriage was the only safe way around the no-sex rule. Marriage was dangled in front of prisoners as the ultimate bonus for hard work and reliable snitching. Men became eligible at
twenty-five, women at twenty-three. Guards announced marriages three or four times a year, usually on propitious dates, such as New Year’s Day or Kim Jong Il’s birthday. Neither bride
nor groom had much say in deciding whom they would marry. If one partner found his or her chosen mate to be unacceptably old, cruel, or ugly, guards would sometimes cancel a marriage. If they did,
neither the man nor the woman would be allowed to marry again.

Shin’s father, Shin Gyung Sub, told Shin that the guards gave him Jang as payment for his skill in operating a metal lathe in the camp’s machine shop. Shin’s mother never told
Shin why she had been given the honour of marriage.

But for her, as for many brides in the camp, marriage was a kind of promotion. It came with a slightly better job and better housing – in the model village, where there was a school and
health clinic. Shortly after her marriage, she was transferred there from a crowded dormitory for women in the camp’s garment factory. Jang was also given a coveted job on a nearby farm,
where there were opportunities to steal corn, rice and green vegetables.

After their marriage, the couple was allowed to sleep together for five consecutive nights. From then on, Shin’s father, who continued to live in a dormitory at his work site, was
permitted to visit Jang a few times a year. Their liaison produced two sons. The eldest, Shin He Geun, was born in 1974. Shin was born eight years later.

The brothers barely knew each other. When Shin was born, his older brother was away in primary school for ten hours a day. By the time Shin was four, his brother had moved out of the house (at
the mandatory age of twelve) and into a dormitory.

As for his father, Shin remembers that he sometimes showed up at night and left early in the morning. He paid little attention to the boy, and Shin grew up indifferent to his presence.

In the years after he escaped the camp, Shin learned that many people associate warmth, security and affection with the words ‘mother’, ‘father’ and
‘brother’. That was not his experience. The guards taught him and the other children in the camp that they were prisoners because of the ‘sins’ of their parents. The
children were told that while they should always be ashamed of their traitorous blood, they could go a long way towards ‘washing away’ their inherent sinfulness by working hard, obeying
the guards and informing on their parents. The tenth rule of Camp 14 said that a prisoner ‘must truly’ consider each guard as his teacher. That made sense to Shin. As a child and
teenager, his parents were exhausted, distant and uncommunicative.

Shin was a scrawny, incurious and for the most part friendless child whose one source of certainty was the guards’ lectures about redemption through snitching. His understanding of right
and wrong, though, was often muddied by encounters he witnessed between his mother and the camp guards.

When he was ten, Shin left his house one evening and went looking for his mother. He was hungry and it was time for her to prepare dinner. He walked to a nearby rice field where his mother
worked and asked a woman if she had seen her.

‘She’s cleaning the
bowijidowon
’s room,’ the woman told him, referring to the office of the guard in charge of the rice farm.

Shin walked to the guard’s office and found the front door locked. He peeked through a window on the side of the building. His mother was on her knees cleaning the floor. As Shin watched,
the
bowijidowon
came into view. He approached Shin’s mother from behind and began to grope her. She offered no resistance. Both of them removed their clothes. Shin watched them have
sex.

He never asked his mother about what he saw, and he never mentioned it to his father.

That same year, students in Shin’s class at primary school were required to volunteer to help their parents at work. He joined his mother one morning to plant rice seedlings. She seemed
unwell and fell behind in her planting. Shortly before the lunch break, her slack pace caught the eye of a guard.

‘You bitch,’ he shouted at her.

‘Bitch’ was the standard form of address when camp guards spoke to female prisoners, while Shin and the other male prisoners were called sons of bitches.

‘How are you able to stuff your face when you can’t even plant rice?’ the guard asked.

She apologized, but the guard grew increasingly angry.

‘This bitch won’t do,’ he shouted.

As Shin stood beside his mother, the guard invented a punishment for her.

‘Go kneel on that ridge there and raise your arms. Stay in that position until I come back from lunch.’

Shin’s mother knelt on the ridge in the sun for an hour and a half, arms reaching for the sky. The boy stood nearby and watched. He did not know what to say to her so he said nothing.

When the guard returned, he ordered Shin’s mother back to work. Weak and hungry, she passed out in the middle of the afternoon. Shin ran to the guard, begging him for help. Other workers
dragged his mother to a shaded rest area, where she regained consciousness.

That evening, Shin went with his mother to an ‘ideological struggle’ meeting, a compulsory gathering for self-criticism. Shin’s mother again fell to her knees at the meeting as
forty of her fellow farm workers followed the
bowijidowon
’s lead and berated her for failing to fill her work quota.

On summer nights, Shin and some of the other small boys in his village would sneak into the orchard just north of the cluster of concrete dwellings where they lived. They
picked unripe pears and cucumbers and ate them as quickly as they could. When they were caught, guards would beat them with batons and ban them from lunch at school for several days.

Guards, though, did not care if Shin and his friends ate rats, frogs, snakes and insects. They were intermittently abundant in the sprawling camp, which used few pesticides, relied on human
waste as fertilizer, and supplied no water for cleaning privies or taking baths.

Eating rats not only filled empty stomachs, it was essential to survival. Their flesh could help prevent pellagra, a sometimes fatal disease that was rampant in the camp, especially in the
winter. Prisoners with pellagra, the result of a lack of protein and niacin in their diets, suffered weakness, skin lesions, diarrhoea and dementia. It was a frequent cause of death.

Catching and roasting rats became a passion for Shin. He caught them in his house, in the fields and in the privy. He would meet his friends in the evening at his primary school, where there was
a coal grill to roast them. Shin peeled away their skin, scraped away their innards, salted what was left and chewed the rest – flesh, bones and tiny feet.