Escape from Camp 14 (20 page)

Shin did not have to worry about brokers, and his physical health was relatively good after half a year of rest and regular meals in the consulate in Shanghai.

But his nightmares would not go away.

They became more frequent and more upsetting. He found his comfortable, well-nourished life impossible to reconcile with the grisly images from Camp 14 that played inside his head.

As his mental health deteriorated, Hanawon’s medical staff realized he needed special care and transferred him to the psychiatric ward of a nearby hospital, where he spent two and a half
months, some of it in isolation and most of it on medication that allowed him to sleep and eat.

He had started keeping a diary in the South Korean Consulate in Shanghai, and doctors in the hospital’s psychiatric ward encouraged him to keep writing it as part of his treatment for what
they diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder.

Shin remembers little of his time in the hospital, except that the nightmares slowly diminished.

After his discharge, he moved into a small apartment purchased for him by the Ministry of Unification. It was located in Hwaseong, a city of about five hundred thousand people
in the low plains of the central Korean Peninsula, near the Yellow Sea and about thirty miles south of Seoul.

For the first month, Shin rarely went outdoors, watching South Korean life unfold from the windows of his apartment. Eventually, he ventured out onto the streets. Shin compares his emergence to
the slow growth of a fingernail. He cannot explain how it happened or why. It just did.

After he began to venture into the city, he took driving lessons. Owing to his limited vocabulary, he twice flunked the written driver’s licence test. Shin found it difficult to find a job
that interested him or to keep a job he was offered. He collected scrap metal, made clay pots and worked in a convenience store.

Career counsellors at Hanawon say most North Koreans have similar experiences of exile. They often depend on the South Korean government to solve their problems and fail to take personal
responsibility for poor work habits or for showing up late on the job. Defectors frequently quit jobs found for them by the government and start businesses that fail. Some newcomers are disgusted
by what they see as the decadence and inequality of life in the South. So to find employers who will put up with the prickliness of newcomers from the North, the Ministry of Unification pays
companies up to eighteen hundred dollars a year if they risk hiring a defector.

Shin spent long hours by himself, feeling desperately lonely in his one-room apartment. He tried to locate his oldest uncle, Shin Tae Sub, whose flight to South Korea after the
Korean War was the crime for which Shin’s father and his entire family had been sent to Camp 14. But Shin had only a name, and the South Korean government told him it had no information on
that name. The Unification Ministry said it could search only for people who had registered to be reunited with lost family members, so Shin gave up the search.

One of the psychiatrists who had treated Shin in the hospital put him in touch with a counsellor from the Database Center for North Korean Human Rights, a non-government organization in Seoul
that gathers, analyses and publishes information about abuses in the North.

The counsellor encouraged Shin to turn his therapeutic diary into a memoir, which the Database Center published in Korean in 2007. While working on the book, Shin began spending nearly all his
time at the office of the Database Center in Seoul, where he was given a place to sleep and made friends with his editors and other staff.

As word spread in Seoul of his birth in and escape from a no-exit labour camp, he began to meet many of the South’s leading human rights activists and heads of defector organizations. His
story was vetted and scrutinized by former prisoners and guards from the camps, as well as by human rights lawyers, South Korean journalists and other experts with extensive knowledge of the camps.
His understanding of how the camps operate, his scarred body and the haunted look in his eyes were persuasive, and he was widely acknowledged to be the first North Korean to come south after
escaping from a political prison.

An Myeong Chul, a guard and driver at four camps in the North, told the
International Herald Tribune
that he had no doubt Shin had lived in a complete control zone. When they met, An said
he noticed telltale signs: avoidance of eye contact and arms bowed by childhood labour.
¹

‘At first, I could not believe Shin because no one ever before succeeded in the escape,’ Kim Tae Jin told me in 2008.
²
He is president
of the Democracy Network Against North Korean Gulag and a defector who spent a decade in Camp 15 before he was released.

But Kim, like others with first-hand knowledge of the camps, concluded after meeting Shin that his story was as solid as it was extraordinary.

Outside South Korea, specialists in human rights began to take note of Shin. In the spring of 2008 he was invited to tour Japan and the United States. He appeared at the
University of California, Berkeley, and Columbia University, and spoke to employees at Google.

As he made friends with people who understood and appreciated what he had endured, he gained confidence and began to fill the gaping holes in his understanding of his homeland. He devoured news
about North Korea, on the Internet and in South Korean newspapers. He read about the history of the Korean Peninsula, the reputation of the Kim family dictatorship and his country’s status as
an international pariah.

At the Database Center, where staff members had been working with North Koreans for years, Shin was viewed as a kind of rough-hewn prodigy.

‘Compared to other defectors, he was a fast learner and highly adaptable to culture shock,’ said Lee Yong-koo, a team leader there.

Tagging along with his new friends, Shin began going to church on Sunday mornings, though he did not understand the concept of a loving and forgiving God.

As a matter of instinct, Shin was reluctant to ask for anything. The teachers in the labour camp had punished children who asked questions. In Seoul, even when he was surrounded by solicitous
and well-informed friends, Shin found it all but impossible to ask for help. He read voraciously, but would not use a dictionary to look up words he did not know or ask a friend to explain
something he did not understand. Because he blinkered out what he could not immediately comprehend, his travels to Tokyo, New York and California did little to awake a sense of wonder and
excitement. Shin knew he was undermining his ability to adapt to his new life, but he also knew that he could not force himself to change.

The only birthdays that mattered in Camp 14 were those of Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung. They are national holidays in North Korea, and even in a no-exit labour camp, prisoners
get the day off.

As for Shin’s birthday, no one paid any attention when he was growing up, including Shin.

That changed when he turned twenty-six in South Korea and four of his friends threw him a surprise party at T.G.I. Friday’s in downtown Seoul.

‘I was very moved,’ he told me when we met for the first time in December 2008, a few days after his birthday.

Such occasions were rare, though, and the birthday party notwithstanding, Shin was not happy in South Korea. He had recently quit a part-time job serving beer in a Seoul pub. He did not know how
he would pay the rent on the tiny three-hundred-dollar-a-month room he occupied in a group apartment downtown and his monthly stipend of eight hundred dollars from the Ministry of Unification had
run out. He had emptied his bank account. He worried out loud that he might have to join the homeless at the central train station in Seoul.

Nor was his social life in great shape. He shared the occasional meal with roommates in his group apartment, but he did not have a girlfriend or a best friend. He declined to socialize or work
with other North Koreans who had been released from labour camps. In this respect, he was like many North Korean defectors. Studies have found that they are slow to socialize and often avoid
contact with others for two to three years after arriving in the South.
¹

His memoir had flopped, about five hundred copies sold from a printing of three thousand. Shin said he made no money from the book.

‘People are not so interested,’ Kim Sang-hun, director of the Database Center, told the
Christian Science Monitor
after his organization published the book. ‘The
indifference of South Korean society to the issue of North Korean rights is so awful.’
²

Shin was by no means the first camp survivor from the North to be greeted with a collective yawn by the South Korean public. Kang Chol-hwan spent a decade with his family in Camp 15 before they
were pronounced ‘redeemable’ and released in 1987. But his wrenching story, written with journalist Pierre Rigoulot and first published in French in 2000, also received scant attention
in South Korea until after it had been translated into English as
The Aquariums of Pyongyang
and a copy found its way onto the desk of President George W. Bush. He invited Kang to the White
House to discuss North Korea, and later described
Aquariums
as ‘one of the most influential books I read during my presidency’.
³

‘I don’t want to be critical of this country,’ Shin told me on the day we met, ‘but I would say that out of the total population of South Korea, only
.001 per cent has any real interest in North Korea. Their way of living does not allow them to think about things beyond their borders. There is nothing in it for them.’

Shin exaggerated the South’s lack of concern about the North, but he had a valid point. It’s a blind spot that baffles local and international human rights groups. Overwhelming
evidence of continuing atrocities inside the North’s labour camps has done little to rouse the South Korean public. As the Korean Bar Association has noted, ‘South Koreans, who publicly
cherish the virtue of brotherly love, have been inexplicably stuck in a deep quagmire of indifference.’
⁴

When South Korean President Lee Myung-bak was elected in 2007, just three per cent of voters named North Korea as a primary concern. They told pollsters that their primary interest was in making
higher salaries.

When it comes to making money, North Korea is an utter waste of time. South Korea’s economy is thirty-eight times larger than the North’s; its international trade volume is two
hundred and twenty-four times larger.
⁵

North Korea’s periodic belligerence, however, does trigger eruptions of anger in the South. This was especially true in 2010, when North Korea launched a sneak submarine attack that killed
forty-six South Korean sailors and sank the
Cheonan
, a warship sailing in South Korean territorial waters. The North also rained artillery shells on a small South Korean island, killing four
people. But the South’s taste for vengeance tends to fade quickly.

After international investigators confirmed that a North Korean torpedo sank the
Cheonan
, voters in the South refused to rally around President Lee, who had said the North Korean
government should ‘pay a price’. There was no South Korean version of the ‘9/11’ effect that propelled the United States into wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Instead,
Lee’s party was routed in a midterm election that showed South Koreans were more interested in preserving peace and protecting living standards than in teaching the North a lesson.

‘There is no winner if war breaks out, hot or cold,’ Lim Seung-youl, a twenty-seven-year-old Seoul clothing distributor, told me. ‘Our nation is richer and smarter than North
Korea. We have to use reason over confrontation.’

South Koreans have spent decades refining what this reason means in response to a next-door dictatorship that has moved about eighty per cent of its total military firepower to within sixty
miles of the Demilitarized Zone, the heavily guarded border strip that separates the two Koreas, and has repeatedly threatened to turn Seoul (located just thirty-five miles from the border) into a
‘sea of fire’. Bloody surprise attacks from the North have a way of recurring every ten to fifteen years, from the 1968 raid by a hit squad that tried to assassinate a South Korean
president, to the 1987 bombing of a Korean Air passenger jet and the failed 1996 submarine infiltration by special forces commandos, to the 2010 sinking of the warship and the shelling of the
island.

The attacks have killed hundreds of South Koreans, but they have yet to provoke the electorate into demanding that their government launch a major counterattack. Nor have they stopped the
average South Korean from getting richer, better educated and better housed in what has become the fourth largest economy in Asia and the eleventh largest in the world.

South Koreans have paid close attention to the price tag of German unification. The proportional burden on South Korea, some studies have found, would be two and a half times greater than on
West Germany after it absorbed the former East Germany. Studies have found that it could cost more than two trillion dollars over thirty years, raise taxes for six decades and require that ten per
cent of the South’s gross domestic product be spent in the North for the foreseeable future.

South Koreans want reunification with the North, but they do not want it right away. Many do not want it during their lifetimes, largely because the cost would be unacceptably high.

Shin and many other North Korean defectors complain, with considerable justification, that South Koreans view them as ill-educated, badly spoken and poorly dressed bumpkins
whose mess of a country is more trouble than it’s worth.

There is ample evidence that South Korean society makes it hard for defectors to fit in. The unemployment rate of North Koreans in the South is four times the national average, while the suicide
rate for defectors is more than two and a half times as high as the rate for South Koreans.