Escape from Camp 14 (5 page)

Collective punishment at school also turned classmates against each other. Shin’s class was often given a daily quota of trees to plant or acorns to gather. If they failed to meet
expectations, everyone in the class was penalized. Teachers would order Shin’s class to give up its lunch ration (for a day or sometimes a week) to another class that had filled its quota. In
work details, Shin was usually slow, often last.

As Shin and his classmates grew older, their work details, called ‘rallies of endeavour’, grew longer and more difficult. During ‘weeding combat’, which occurred between
June and August, primary school students worked from four in the morning until dusk pulling weeds in corn, bean and sorghum fields.

When Shin and his classmates entered secondary school, they were barely literate. But by then classroom instruction had come to an end. Teachers became foremen. Secondary school was a staging
ground for work details in mines, fields and forests. At the end of the day, it was a gathering place for long sessions of self-criticism.

Shin entered his first coal mine at the age of ten. He and five of his classmates (three boys and three girls, including his neighbour Moon Sung Sim) walked down a steep shaft to the face of the
mine. Their job was to load coal into two-ton ore cars and push them uphill on a narrow rail track to a staging area. To meet their daily quota, they had to get four cars up the hill.

The first two took all morning. After a lunch of milled corn and salted cabbage, the exhausted children, their faces and clothes covered in coal dust, headed back to the coalface, carrying
candles in the ink-black mine.

One day, pushing the third car, Moon Sung Sim lost her balance and one of her feet slipped beneath a steel wheel. Shin, who was standing next to her, heard a scream. He tried to help the
writhing, sweating girl remove her shoe. Her big toe was crushed and oozing blood. Another student tied a shoelace around her ankle as a kind of tourniquet.

Shin and two other boys lifted Moon into an empty coal car and pushed it to the top of the mine. Then they carried her to the camp hospital, where her mangled toe was amputated without
anaesthetic and treated with salt water.

In addition to harder physical work, secondary school students spent more time finding fault with themselves and each other. They wrote in their cornhusk notebooks, preparing for the nightly
self-censure sessions that took place after the evening meal. About ten students a night had to admit to something.

Shin tried to meet with his classmates before these sessions to sort out who would confess to what. They invented sins that would satisfy teachers without provoking draconian punishment. Shin
remembers confessing to eating corn he found on the ground and to taking a catnap when no one was looking. If students volunteered enough transgressions, punishments were usually a smack on the
head and a warning to work harder.

Wedged closely together, twenty-five boys slept on the concrete floor in the secondary school dormitory. The strongest boys slept near – but not too near – a
coal-heated flue that ran under the floor. Weaker boys, including Shin, slept farther away and often shivered through the night. Some had no choice but to try to sleep on top of the flue, where
they risked severe burns when the heating system flared up.

Shin remembers a stoutly built, prideful twelve-year-old named Ryu Hak Chul. He slept wherever he chose and was the only boy who dared sass a teacher.

Ryu ditched his work assignment one day, and his disappearance was quickly reported. His teacher sent Shin’s class to find the missing boy.

‘Why’d you stop working and run away?’ the teacher asked when Ryu had been found and marched back to school.

To Shin’s astonishment, Ryu did not apologize.

‘I got hungry, so I went to eat,’ he said flatly.

The teacher, too, was astonished.

‘Is this son of a bitch talking back?’ the teacher asked.

He ordered the students to tie Ryu to a tree. They took off his shirt and bound him with wire.

‘Beat him until he comes to his senses,’ the teacher said.

Without a thought, Shin joined his classmates in thrashing Ryu.

Shin was nine years old when the North Korean caste system knocked him on the head.

It was early spring and he and about thirty of his classmates were walking towards the train station, where their teacher had sent them to pick up coal that had spilled from railroad cars during
loading. The station is near the south-western corner of Camp 14, and to get there from school the students had to pass below the Bowiwon compound, which sits on a bluff above the Taedong River.
The guards’ children live in the compound and attend school there.

From up above, the guards’ children shouted at Shin and his classmates as they walked by.

‘Reactionary sons of bitches are coming.’

Rocks the size of fists rained down on the prison children. With the river below and the bluff above, they had no place to hide. A rock hit Shin in the face, just below his left eye, opening up
a deep cut. Shin and his classmates shrieked and cowered on the dirt road, trying to protect their heads with their arms and hands.

A second rock struck Shin on the head, knocking him to the ground and making him dizzy. When his head cleared, the stoning had stopped. Many of his classmates were moaning and bleeding. Moon,
his neighbour and classmate who later lost her big toe in the mine, had been knocked out. The leader of Shin’s class, Hong Joo Hyun, who was supposed to be a kind of foreman for the
day’s work mission, was also out cold.

Earlier that morning at school, their teacher had told them to hurry ahead to the train station and start work. He said he would catch up later.

When the teacher finally walked down the road and discovered his bloodied students sprawled in the road, he became angry.

‘What are you doing not getting yourselves to work?’ he shouted.

The students timidly asked what they should do with their classmates who were still unconscious.

‘Put them on your backs and carry them,’ the teacher instructed. ‘All you need to do is work hard.’

In the years ahead, when Shin spotted Bowiwon children anywhere in the camp, he walked in the opposite direction if he could.

Bowiwon children had every reason to throw stones at the likes of Shin. His blood, as the offspring of irredeemable sinners, was tainted in the worst conceivable way. Bowiwon
children, however, came from families whose lineage had been sanctified by the Great Leader.

To identify and isolate his perceived political enemies, Kim Il Sung created a neofeudal, blood-based pecking order in 1957. The government classified and, to a considerable extent, segregated
the entire North Korean population based on the perceived reliability of an individual’s parents and grandparents. North Korea called itself the Worker’s Paradise, but even as it
professed allegiance to communist ideals of equality, it invented one of the world’s most rigidly stratified caste systems.

Three broad classes were created with fifty-one subgroups: at the top, members of the core class could obtain jobs in government, the Korean Workers’ Party, officer ranks in the military
and the intelligence services. The core class included farm workers, families of soldiers killed during the Korean War, families of troops who had served with Kim Il Sung fighting against Japanese
occupation and government workers.

The next level was the wavering or neutral class, which included soldiers, technicians and teachers. At the bottom was the hostile class, whose members were suspected of opposing the government.
They included former property owners, relatives of Koreans who had fled to South Korea, Christians and those who worked for the Japanese colonial government that controlled the Korean Peninsula
before World War II. Their descendants now work in mines and factories. They are not allowed into universities.

Besides dictating career opportunities, the system shaped geographic destiny, with the core class allowed to live in and around Pyongyang. Many members of the hostile class were resettled to
distant provinces along the Chinese border. Some members of the wavering class could move up in the system by joining the Korean People’s Army, serving with distinction and, with luck and
connections, securing a lower rung in the ruling party.

Rapid growth of private markets made some traders from the wavering and hostile classes wealthy, allowing them to buy and bribe their way into better living standards than some of the political
elite.
¹

For government positions, though, family background decided nearly everything, including who had the right to throw stones at Shin.

The only North Koreans considered trustworthy enough to become guards in political prison camps were men like An Myeong Chul, the son of a North Korean intelligence officer.

He was recruited into the Bowibu at nineteen, after two years of military service. As part of the process, the loyalty of his entire extended family was checked. He was also required to sign a
document saying he would never disclose the existence of the camps. Sixty per cent of the two hundred young men who were recruited with him as guards were also the sons of intelligence
officers.

An worked as a guard and driver in four labour camps (not including Camp 14) for seven years in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He fled to China in 1994 after his father, who supervised regional
food distribution, ran afoul of his superiors and committed suicide. After finding his way to South Korea, An found work as a banker in Seoul and married a South Korean woman. They have two
children. He also became a human rights activist.

After his defection he learned that his sister and brother were sent to a labour camp, where his brother later died.

When we spoke at a Chinese dinner in Seoul in 2009, An wore a dark blue suit, white shirt, striped tie and half-frame glasses. He looked prosperous and spoke in a quiet, careful way.

When he was training to be a guard, he studied the Korean martial art of tae kwon do, learned riot-suppression techniques and was instructed not to worry if his treatment of prisoners caused
injury or death. In the camps, he became accustomed to hitting prisoners who did not meet work quotas. He remembers beating up a hunchbacked prisoner.

‘It was normal to beat prisoners,’ he said, explaining that his instructors taught him never to smile and to think of inmates as ‘dogs and pigs’.

‘We were taught not to think of them as human beings,’ he said. ‘The instructors told us not to show pity. They said, “If you do, you will become a
prisoner.”’

Although pity was forbidden, there were few other guidelines for treatment of prisoners. As a result, An said, guards were free to indulge their appetites and eccentricities, often preying on
attractive young female prisoners who would usually consent to sex in exchange for better treatment.

‘If this resulted in babies, women and their babies were killed,’ An said, noting that he had personally seen newborns clubbed to death with iron rods. ‘The theory behind the
camps was to cleanse unto three generations the families of incorrect thinkers. So it was inconsistent to allow another generation to be born.’

Guards could win admission to college if they caught an inmate trying to escape – an incentive system that ambitious guards seized upon. Sometimes they would enable prisoners to make an
escape attempt, An said, and shoot them before they reached the fences that surround the camps.

Most often, though, prisoners were beaten, sometimes to death, simply because guards were bored or in a sour mood.

Although prison guards and their legitimate children belong by blood to the core class, they are fringe functionaries locked away for most of their working lives in the
freezing hinterlands.

The core of the core live in Pyongyang in large apartments or single-family homes located in gated neighbourhoods. Outsiders do not know with any certainty how many of these elite there are in
North Korea, but South Korean and American scholars believe they are a tiny fraction of the country’s population, numbering between one and two hundred thousand out of twenty-three
million.

Trusted and talented members of the elite are periodically allowed outside the country, where they serve as diplomats and traders for state-owned companies. In the past decade, the United States
government and law enforcement agencies around the world have documented that some of these North Koreans are involved in criminal enterprises that funnel hard currency to Pyongyang.

They have been linked to counterfeiting hundred-dollar bills, cyberterrorism, trafficking drugs ranging from heroin to Viagra, and marketing high-quality brand-name (but counterfeit) cigarettes.
According to UN officials, and in violation of United Nations resolutions, North Koreans have also sold rockets and nuclear weapons technology to countries including Iran and Syria.

One well-travelled member of the North Korean elite told me how he earned his keep while securing the support and affections of Kim Jong Il. His name is Kim Kwang Jin and he grew up in Pyongyang
as a member of the blue-blood elite. He studied British literature at Kim Il Sung University, which is reserved for children of top officials. His professional expertise, before defecting to South
Korea in 2003, was managing a state-run global insurance fraud. It collected hundreds of millions of dollars from some of the world’s largest insurance companies on falsified claims for
industrial accidents and natural disasters inside North Korea, and it funnelled most of the money to the Dear Leader.

The festive annual highlight of this scheme took place in the week before Kim Jong Il’s birthday on 16 February. Foreign-based executives of the Korean National Insurance Corporation, the
state monopoly that orchestrated the fraud, prepared a special birthday gift.

From his office in Singapore, Kim Kwang Jin watched in early February 2003 as his colleagues stuffed twenty million dollars in cash into two heavy-duty bags and sent them, via Beijing, to
Pyongyang. This was money that had been paid by international insurance companies, and it was not a one-time offering. Kim said that in the five years he was based in Pyongyang for the state
insurance corporation, bags of cash always arrived in time for his leader’s birthday. He said they came from Switzerland, France and Austria, as well as from Singapore.