Long Road Home: Testimony of a North Korean Camp Survivor (24 page)

Pillar of Fire

I don’t know how long we walked on the muddy sand. Our socks and shoes were completely soaked in mud, which kept us from moving swiftly. Our bodies were dripping. The two women sometimes needed help, and I could see why Mr. and Mrs. M had sent us as a group. Although I’d been very close to death when I escaped North Korea, six months of care had restored my strength to lead and support two fellow travelers. We marched forward without talking. We all felt like we’d walked far more than two miles when we reached tall fences with barbed wire at the top. There they stood, about eight feet high, like a highlight of a spectacular journey. There were two rows of fencing not far apart. We all gasped for breath at that exciting moment. This was it! Without wasting a single minute, we threw our backpacks on the ground and I promptly bent down to make a stool for the two women to stand on so they could reach out and grab the top of the barbed wire. Then I got up and lifted them so that they could go over and land in between the two fences. When they were done, I threw all three backpacks to the other side and climbed over the fence myself. We repeated the same process for the second fence, and there we were in Mongolia. We were so excited that we did not notice how our clothes and skin had gotten torn when we grabbed the sharp wires with our bare hands. We were ecstatic as our cheeks, hands, and legs were bleeding from deep scratches. The rain had stopped by then, but the ground was as muddy as it could get. We kept walking and walking. We walked and talked. But our talking became rare as we kept going, because we started to wonder whether we would be able to meet anyone or anything on the road. I still cannot tell how much distance we covered after we crossed the two rows of fences. Our legs were deep in the mud and moving became increasingly difficult. When we’d just crossed the border, I was so ecstatic that I was not even aware of the big backpack on my back, but now that the excitement had slowly dissipated, I started to feel its weight. Soaked in rain, it felt heavier than ever. New anxieties started to emerge in our minds. Where were we? Why could we not find anything—shelter of any kind, any people? The night was vast and dark, not giving us any hint as to where we were heading. We did not have any plans about what to do in Mongolia. Even Mr. and Mrs. M had told us that everything would be fine once we got there. All of us had been so focused on our immediate goal—to escape China, where we could be sent back to North Korea—that nobody had envisioned this stage of our long journey.

Fear began to arise, but I did not speak of it. All I could hear was the heavy drops of rain falling onto the sandy desert again. About an hour after our border crossing, the two women started to talk to each other in low voices, wondering why they were walking endlessly without running into anything. This was the Gobi Desert, a name I’d only heard of when I studied geography in school a long time ago. Now I was leaving my footprints there, but before I completed my journey it could simply swallow me without any trace. Even in darkness, we could sense that there was really nothing on the far distant horizon. We were completely surrounded by the merciless vastness. Our legs were bleeding from scratches, but we did not waste any time putting bandages on, as we wanted to move as far away from China as we could. The night in the desert was chilly, especially under pouring rain for hours. As we marched forward, I could hear my teeth chatter. We could not see well due to the heavy showers. Our initial fear had been discovery by the border patrol, but now we were worried about not running into anyone. What if we had to walk for weeks in this wasteland? What if our provisions ran out? The emerging battle with nature started to overwhelm us and we increasingly looked downward as our strength ran low.

That was when I saw it. I lifted my eyes to fight gloomy thoughts and overwhelming fatigue and saw on the distant horizon a huge pillar of fire in a whirling wheel, rising up from the horizon and reaching high into the dark sky. It was in the distance, out of our reach, but it shed enough light to illuminate our path through the heavy rainfall. No words can describe it, as I have seen nothing like it before or since. It was simply out of this world. I became tongue-tied and my mind swiftly glided into ecstasy as I saw this illumination reach the sky from the horizon. I stopped walking for the first time that night. Completely forgetting about everything, I shouted out loud:

“Do you see it? Do you see it?”

“I see it, I see it clearly!!”

“Yes, yes, I see it too!!!” The two women were also beside themselves.

We did not say anything else or think about anything else. We simply followed the light. I have no way of knowing how far we walked toward that pillar of fire. We walked and walked like mad zombies. Soon there appeared another two rows of barbed-wire fence, and we jumped over them without thinking. We were simply marching toward the incredible magnet. It felt like I was living in one of those biblical miracles, like when Moses opened a path in the Red Sea for his people to escape. The pillar reminded me of Jacob’s ladder connecting earth to heaven. The pillar of fire, which was guiding our movements, was not of this world. It was God’s providence.

We did not know where exactly we were heading. All we knew was that we were following the guiding light. We were in complete oblivion when harsh flashlights brought us back to this world.

A border guard was yelling at us in an incomprehensible language, but it was obvious he was ordering us to halt. We stopped, gradually coming to our senses and realizing that we had been discovered. It was still pouring. There was no more pillar, but we saw flickering lights in the distance, which looked like a compound of two or three barracks. Still mesmerized by what we’d seen, we did not resist but followed the guard to the border station. When we entered, we were completely shocked. We were in China! We saw the red flag with yellow stars on the wall and froze. We looked at one another in fear. The divine guiding light had led us to dangerous territory! We had walked all night without a break and we were still in China! The Chinese guards made us take off most of our clothes and started searching every single inch of our possessions. One guard even ripped off all three backpacks, including the padded straps, to see if we possessed any contraband. Our backpacks and the personal belongings inside them were completely soaked, but the Chinese kept scrutinizing every little detail. I was extremely afraid because I was carrying a map of China in the back pocket of my jeans. Mrs. M had given it to me in Yanji after she marked all the cities that we’d stayed in or were going to pass, which exposed the trail of our escape from the Korean- Chinese towns of Tumen and Yanji to Beijing, then to Erenhot, and finally to Mongolia. If the guards saw the map, there would be little question where we’d come from or what we were trying to do. I was scared to death. I held my breath as I silently watched how the search progressed. The other two were also in silent panic. The patrol examined all the belongings that Mr. and Mrs. M had given us upon our departure: shoes, South Korean passports, underwear, toothbrushes and skin lotion, towels, Bible, first aid kit, pen, and notebooks. My jeans, which were completely soaked by the rain, were thrown on one of the chairs and not scrutinized. I held my breath to conceal any signs of anxiety and watched how raindrops dripped down the windowpane one after another, first at short intervals, then at more prolonged intervals, waiting until the guards finally searched the jeans. However, miraculously enough, they completely neglected to check them. After the thorough search, they returned our belongings and let us change into new clothes from the backpacks. L was as relieved as I, since she was carrying her North Korean Workers’ Party membership card. She held onto it for the day she had to prove who she was back in North Korea. However, in this particular situation, it would have really harmed everyone. Having anticipated the danger of being exposed before she reached the final destination, when we left Yanji, she decided to keep it safely in the most secretive place in her body. When the police left us to change our clothes, she whispered how glad she was to have rolled the membership card, wrapped it in plastic, and inserted it in her vagina.

On the Threshold

At first we were detained in the garage. We decided that we would act as if we were South Korean tourists who’d gotten lost during a tour of the border region. We agreed to argue that we’d voluntarily come to the patrol station to seek help. We protested with all our might, banging the metal door with our fists and shouting.

“How can a socialist country lock up people who came to seek help from it?”

The Chinese guards, not understanding a word of Korean we spoke, would respond by banging the door with their metal club. This noisy back-and-forth went on for a while. A couple of days later, we were transferred to a medical ward with ten hospital beds. Two armed guards were on duty outside. We got scared. We would end up in North Korea and die if we did nothing, so we decided to go on a hunger strike and demand that we be sent back to Mongolia where we’d come from. We started fasting and kept praying. L prayed most fervently throughout the entire period. She used to read palms and tell fortunes in North Korea, but she had turned into an ardent believer of Christianity. With L leading the prayers, we fasted for fourteen days at that border station, drinking only water. By the end of the last day we were so weak that we almost crawled, dragging each other, to go to the toilet. The Chinese authorities became worried that we would pass out under their supervision. Now they were guarding us not because they thought we would escape, but because we might faint and require medical attention at any moment. They started bringing in more delicious food, but we would not touch any. The commander of the post would come and talk to us. He was a skinny, scruffy man in his mid-fifties, always smelling of alcohol. The last time he came to see us, he brought porridge and told us many things, which were all communicated through body language without an interpreter. He said that he believed we were South Koreans, but in order to prove that we really were, we had to give up fasting and regain strength. He told us more strange things, and I do not understand to this day why. God lets things happen through human agency in the most unexpected ways. The commander told us that thirty miles directly north of the post was a border region between China and Mongolia without any physical demarcation line. But it was a dangerous route since there were wild foxes waiting for human prey, so he would not recommend it. Even more surprisingly, he told us that it would be better for us to try the wire dividing the two countries. Through vivid body language, he told us we need to bend at the waist to keep from being seen by the night watch’s binoculars when walking around this area. He said that in a couple of days he would be away for three days’ training and told us to be well in the meantime. Then he once again offered us the porridge and left. We followed his advice and ate it all. We were amazed by how much he’d told us and took it as a message that if we were planning to escape, he wanted us to do it during his absence. It was also amazing that we could communicate with one another by using limited Russian vocabulary and body language.

L told me that she had a premonition that the guards would hand us over to the immigration authorities in Beijing since they’d had us in custody for too long. Being sent back to Beijing meant death, because even if we ended up in the South Korean embassy, the South Koreans would soon find out that our passports were fake and would not do anything to help us. The embassy in Beijing simply did not want to upset China, and accepting North Korean refugees against Chinese intention to repatriate them was not in their interest. Even worse, if we were handed over to the North Korean embassy, we would surely be sent back to North Korea for execution. We gathered our wits to plan for escape. We noticed that after we’d started fasting, the guards became inattentive, as they knew that we did not have the strength to run away. They would often doze off late at night. A few days after the meeting with the commander, we escaped, having realized that the guards fell asleep immediately after they arrived at their post. The strange commander was still away for training. At 2:00 a.m. we grabbed the chance and removed a mosquito net from a small ventilation window. There was really no way to pack anything except for money and passports; we left everything else behind. Instead of wearing shoes, we wore three layers of socks in order to make a silent exit. I helped the two women escape first through the window. I have heard that people can summon superhuman power when they face extraordinary circumstances determining life and death, and I went through amazing moments of survival myself when escaping from camp. But when I saw those two famished women fly out of that high window, I could not help but be reminded of the extraordinary power that is innate in every human being. Completely enervated from the prolonged hunger strike, they were literally dragging each other to the toilet just a few hours before! I also do not remember how I crawled out that small window. We lowered our torsos as the commander had told us to do and started to run away from the brightly lit area surrounding the post. Mongolia was just steps away beyond the multiple layers of barbed wire. We ran about a mile and a half until we ran into the barbed-wire zone. The women’s shirts got stuck in the fence and we had to pull or drag one another. Our arms and legs were scratched and soon covered with multiple cuts. Nevertheless, we were running for our lives and nothing could stop us. We heard barking dogs and saw flashlights behind us as we were finally crossing the border. Our feeble, famished bodies were covered with sweat and blood, and all three of us lost consciousness soon after setting foot in Mongolia.

The Journey Continues

A tingling sensation of water drops rolled down my cheeks. When I opened my eyes, I saw the broad face of a stern-looking middle-aged man. I was lying on the ground, surrounded by an entire platoon of Mongolian border guards looking down at us. The stern-faced man was their leader. He was sitting on a stool and sprinkling water on us with a long willow branch that he dipped into a bucket of water. The two women were still unconscious. We looked like fugitives, without shoes and with torn clothes stuck to our bloody skin. I worried that the Chinese might have informed their Mongolian partners about our escape. When the two women woke up, the platoon leader brought an interpreter to interrogate us. He was a young Mongolian man who had spent a year studying the Korean language in Seoul.