Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (61 page)

Kim’s escape was made relatively easy by the fact that Germany had reunified the year following his arrival. “So I basically lived in a free country. I could defect any time, just get a cab and run away as fast as I could. I’ve been told by the South Korean authorities not to give details, but, briefly, I went through southern Germany. I thought of going to the South Korean consulate in Berlin, but North Korea had an embassy there so I thought it was too dangerous. The escape itself was unadventurous, though. I just got up earlier than usual one day, got my bag and left.”

The unsettling part was abandoning his family back in North Korea. “I figured if I went back they would go to prison with me,” Kim told me. Did that mean things were no worse for them than if he had gone back to face the music? “I can’t say yes or no,” he replied. “If I agree, it seems I’m rationalizing the abandonment of my family.”

Kim took a pessimistic view both of his former country’s future and of his new country’s capacity for dealing with it. “North Korea will never change,” he said. “The tragedy of South Koreans is believing that North Korea will change. There are three groups in South Korea. One group thinks, ‘North Korea will change’; the second, ‘North Korea is changing’; and the third, ‘I “will make North Korea change.’ You seem to understand me,” he told me, “but South Koreans don’t seem to understand what I’ve been through. South Koreans actually believe North Korea will change.”

He said he saw no way to get Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il out of power so that change could take place, without war. “The North Korean regime is a very brutal one. There may be internal problems, but they have the ability, the power and the brutality to suppress them.” I mentioned the American plan to start Radio Free Asia, which would broadcast news of North Korea into North Korea in the Korean language. It might help a little, he thought. “It wouldn’t affect ordinary people but could affect high officials. I don’t see any negative aspects in influencing at least some people.” The people knew that high officials under Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il were not the only ones responsible for all that went wrong, he said. “They just can’t name Kim father and son as the reasons for their harsh lives, so they talk as if they blamed only the other high officials.” In the case of the some ten thousand members of State Security, however, blame was cast sincerely. “If the regime collapses, the ten thousand are gone. People hate them so much. The radio service wouldn’t affect them, but other high officials will listen. Changing a little can be positive.”

Probably it is necessary to look beyond Korea to find whatever “factionalism” might have brought ruin upon three generations of Kang Te-hyu’s family. Kang was one of the ethnically Korean returnees from Japan. In Kyoto, he had run a lucrative
pachinko
business. Although his wealth came from a capitalistic enterprise in Japan, Kang was a devout socialist who wore his Korean patriotism on his sleeve. Before moving his family to the communist motherland in 1963, he ran the trade and commerce unit of Japan’s Pyongyang-directed Korean residents’ association, Chongryon. His wife headed Chongryon’s Kyoto women’s group.

When the family moved to North Korea Kang gave his wealth to the state, to the tune of several million dollars. Indeed, his grandson told me, it was Kang who donated the funds to build the gigantic statue of Kim Il-sung
in Pyongyang to which visitors were urged to present flowers—the statue that was golden for a while before being bronzed in reported response to Deng Xiaoping’s expression of distaste.

Kang and his family rated a royal red-carpet welcome. He became vice-director of a government unit that supplied goods for department stores. His wife became a member of the Supreme People’s Assembly. Kang had four sons and two daughters. The family lived “well in the communist capital.

In Pyongyang at the time, Kang’s grandson Kang Chul-hwan told me, “it would have been rare to find anyone with a car, but we had a Volvo. We were what you “would call bourgeois even though Grandfather ideologically was very much a socialist. A Japanese reporter got a photo of our family taken in 1966 as Kim Il-sung propaganda, and sent it to the Japanese press to show the family was living ’well.”

That was two years before Kang Chul-hwan’s birth as son of patriarch Kang’s eldest son. Chul-hwan’s father, in keeping with East Asian custom, remained in the elder Kang’s household after going to work as a photographer, marrying another ethnic Korean from Japan and starting a family that eventually included Chul-hwan and a younger daughter. Chul-hwan recalled that the family had lived an “extravagant” life by North Korean standards— until they were imprisoned.

“We lived “well,” Kang Chul-hwan told me. “We lived in central Pyongyang and went to the schools attended by the children of the elite. My three uncles went to Kim Il-sung University.” Not being the firstborn, the uncles as they married established separate households.

After a while, the North Korean authorities began to find it inconvenient to host the returnees from Japan and started banishing them to remote areas or sending them to camps or prisons. Fifteen years after his arrival, the elder Kang’s turn came. “Grandfather was taken away at the time when the regime was getting rid of Koreans from Japan,” Chul-hwan told me. “He was one of the last taken away. We didn’t know what they did with him.” The grandson explained that conflicts had arisen broadly because “the Korean residents of Japan who returned to North Korea were not used to a closed society. They often badmouthed what they saw—and got penalized for it. But in Grandfather’s case we speculate that it was opposition to Han Duk-su, chairman of the Chongryon back in Japan, that got him in trouble.”

When the grandfather was taken away, Kang Chul-hwan told me, “they sent the rest of the household including me and my youngest uncle to a concentration camp. The married aunts and uncles weren’t sent to the camp, but they were expelled from Pyongyang and sent to mountainous areas in the north. They became coal miners there, at Musangun, North Hamgyong Province. My family and I were sent to the camp at Yodok. There was a separate complex there for people who had migrated from foreign countries, including Japan and Russia. We were assigned there.”

Only nine at the time, Chul-hwan at first “thought I was going on something like a family camping trip. It was the first time I had seen mountains. Ithought they were beautiful. But when I saw the gates with armed guards, they reminded me of a Japanese concentration camp I had seen in a movie about the evil Japanese and I thought, ‘Oh! Are there such camps in Korea?’ I thought only the cruel Japanese would do such a thing. I was so surprised to hear that the Beloved Fatherly Leader would build a camp so cruel. We asked “why we were sent there and they said, ‘Oh, you did a very wicked thing. You should be punished to death. But thanks to the benevolence of the Great Leader you are being allowed to live.’ They never explained what we were accused of, but lots of Korean former residents of Japan were there and they speculated it was because Grandfather opposed Han Duk-su’s chairmanship of Chongryon.”

Chul-hwan attended the camp school. “The school was not for education, though,” he told me. “It was for brain-washing. They weren’t real teachers. They were all sent from State Security. We didn’t have regular courses but they taught us courses on Kim Il-sung’s revolutionary history and his thought.” Even though he was a prisoner, Kang Chul-hwan believed what he was taught, for a while. “After junior high, I started to turn against Kim Il-sung. But when you’re young, you believe the propaganda. Parents can’t say anything, because little kids would blab and the parents would get in trouble.”

Whenever the young prisoners were not being indoctrinated, Kang Chul-hwan told me, “we were used as forced labor. The principal gave us a speech: ‘Your parents are political criminals, but thanks to the benevolence of the Great Leader the government is being very generous to you. It will educate you even though your parents did terrible things. To repay this generosity, you must work very hard for the country’ We had to go out and gather fire-wood, and also medicinal herbs that could be exported for foreign exchange. We went to the mountains to search for thick, old trees that could be cut down, and we had to help with the farming.”

Brutality was the rule in the camp, Kang Chul-hwan said. “In North Korea a person has two lives, natural and political. But once you get sent to a prison camp your political life is over and you have only your natural life. You’re nothing, an animal, a savage. The guards have the right to kill you without penalty because you’re just an animal. If you disobey them or talk back, the guards hit you. It’s human nature then to fight back, but if you do they’ll shoot you. In one year’s time they would stage public executions fifteen or twenty times. People who tried to escape and didn’t get far were simply shot on the spot. But if you cost the guards a lot of time and trouble before they recaptured you, they would have a public execution.

“When reunification comes, people should go to the sites of the prison camps. Alongside the camps, in the mountain areas, there are so many unmarked graves. In ten years I think about twenty thousand people died at my
camp. The part of the camp I was in had a population of about twenty thousand. Enough people kept dying to make room for all the newcomers. Ihad about eighty classmates. By the time Igraduated from junior high, half-were dead, mostly from malnutrition and overwork.”

Kang Chul-hwan told me that the camp his family inhabited was in fact “one of the more comfortable” of some twenty camps in the North Korean gulag. I wondered how he knew that. “Most people know about those camps,” he told me. “And some people in my camp came from other camps, so I heard about those.”

Kang Chul-hwan described himself as one of the stronger prisoners. “I was able to survive a decade in the camp—nine years and eight months, to be precise, from August 4, 1977, to February 28, 1987.” His family members came out alive, but some were not as strong as he. His grandmother and his father died soon after their release. “Grandmother had been hanging on just to get out of the camp before dying.” Her motive: Dying before release makes traditional ancestral rites difficult if not impossible. Although the regime formally disapproved of such observances, “it couldn’t be stopped even by Kim Il-sung,” Chul-hwan said. “But the graves of people who died in the camp are there adjoining the camp, so their descendants can’t go and pay homage. We were very fortunate.”

Kang said the family was released only after relatives in Japan applied great pressure. “The question of restoring diplomatic ties between North Korea and Japan came up during 1986 and 1987. A lot of Chongryon members visited North Korea to see what had become of their relatives. The lucky people who had relatives in Japan filing complaints were let out of the camps. We had lots of relatives in Japan. Relatives came twice to North Korea to find us, but each time the government told them we had gone on vacation. After that, instead of coming over, they filed complaints. They finally got to meet some of the family in North Korea. Lots of relatives in Japan sent a lot of money. My uncles and aunts, who had been sent to the mountains as miners, ended up with cars and color television sets.

“After release we were sent to a farm in Yodok County. Then our relatives in Japan bribed high officials to send us to a more comfortable city in the same county. With the help of our relatives we were able to get nice clothes and other luxuries. When we met our relatives after the deaths of my father and grandmother, we weren’t supposed to tell them about the camp. When the word came that they would visit us, a State Security official came and instructed us not to say anything about it. Also, State Security sent people to repair the house. They told us to say, ‘We are living a very affluent life under the care of the Great Leader.’ In North Korea you are supposed to get free medical care, retirement benefits when you get to be sixty and other benefits. State Security told us to show the relatives the entitlement cards. We did, but our relatives said, ‘Oh, we have that in Japan, too.’ ”
⁷

Kang Chul-hwan eventually encountered further trouble with the regime and defected from North Korea, as we shall see in chapter 34.

Kang Chul-ho and Kang Chul-hwan were not related, despite the similiarity of their names. But each could trace his troubles with the authorities back to a grandfather who was out of favor with the regime. Kang Chul-ho could not even remember the name of his grandfather. All he knew was that the old man was a respected veteran of the anti-Japanese resistance movement who was working as a party official in the east coast city of Hamhung when the authorities barged into the house at night, seized a book manuscript in which he had written critically about Kim Il-sung and took him away. The family never heard from him again. The grandmother always spoke favorably of Pak Hon-yong—the “domestic faction” leader who had been condemned to death in 1955 and presumably executed—so perhaps Kang Chul-ho’s grandfather had been purged as a remnant of that faction.

What happened afterward to Kang Chul-ho is one of the more gut-wrenching of the stories I heard in my interviews with defectors. His father had been working as a management official in an electrical products factory in Hamhung. Five days after the authorities seized the grandfather, they banished the rest of the family—Chul-ho’s grandmother, parents and elder brother—to Koyang in remote Hamju County. After the move, his father worked as a bricklayer and “was questioned repeatedly by Public Security,” Kang Chul-ho told me. The hot-blooded father was so annoyed by the constant questions that he set fire to the local State Security building. For that he was executed, in 1976. “It was a public execution by shooting. I was there with my family when my father was executed. I witnessed it, at the public execution site near the riverside, close to Hamhung.” Could it get any worse for a little boy? Oh, yes. “My mother committed suicide when my father was executed. Grandmother lived far away, and was too old to help. Local people discriminated against my family, shunned us because of what had happened,” he continued. Thinking of-what this poor fellow had been through at the age of eight, I already felt like hugging him.