Escape from Camp 14 (8 page)

Shin did not know what to say.

‘I’ll ask you just one more time,’ the chief interrogator said. ‘What were your father, mother and brother planning to do after their escape?’

‘I really don’t know,’ Shin replied.

‘If you tell the truth right now, I’ll save you. If not, I’ll kill you. Understand?’

Shin remembers paralysing confusion.

‘I’ve been easy on you until now because you’re a kid,’ the interrogator said. ‘Don’t try my patience.’

Again, Shin failed to reply.

‘This son of a bitch won’t do!’ the chief interrogator shouted.

The chief’s lieutenants surrounded Shin and pulled off his clothes. Shackles were locked around his ankles and tied to the chain that hung from the ceiling. The winch started up, pulling
Shin off his feet. His head hit the floor with a thud. His hands were bound together with a rope that was threaded through a hook on the ceiling. When the trussing was done, his body formed a U,
his face and feet toward the ceiling, his bare back toward the floor.

The chief interrogator shouted more questions. Shin remembers giving no coherent answers. The chief told one of his men to fetch something.

A tub full of burning charcoal was dragged beneath Shin. One of the interrogators used a bellows to stoke the coals, then the winch lowered Shin towards the flames.

‘Keep going until he talks,’ the chief said.

Shin, crazed with pain and smelling his burning flesh, twisted away from the heat. One of the guards grabbed a gaff hook from the wall and pierced the boy in the lower abdomen, holding him over
the fire until he lost consciousness.

Shin awoke in his cell. The guards had dressed him in his ill-fitting prison outfit, which he’d soiled with excrement and urine. He had no idea how long he had lain
unconscious on the floor. His lower back was blistered and sticky with discharge. The flesh around his ankles had been scraped away.

For two days, Shin managed to shuffle around in his cell and eat. Guards brought him whole steamed ears of corn, along with corn porridge and cabbage soup. But as his burns became infected, he
grew feverish, lost his appetite and found it nearly impossible to move.

Seeing Shin curled up on the floor of his cell, a guard shouted in the prison hallway, ‘That little runt is really tough.’

Shin guesses ten days came and went before his final interrogation. It took place in his cell because he was too weak to get up off the floor. But he was no longer afraid. For the first time, he
found the words to defend himself.

‘I was the one who reported this,’ he said. ‘I did a good job.’

His interrogators didn’t believe him, but instead of threatening or hurting Shin, they asked questions. He explained all that he had heard in his mother’s house and what he had said
to the night guard at school. He begged his interrogators to talk to Hong Sung Jo, the classmate who could confirm his story.

They promised nothing and left his cell.

Shin’s fever grew worse and the blisters on his back swelled with pus. His cell smelled so bad that the guards refused to step inside.

After several days – though the exact length of time is unclear as Shin was delirious and drifting in and out of consciousness – the guards opened his cell door and ordered two
prisoners to go in. They picked Shin up and carried him down the corridor to another cell. The guards locked Shin inside. There was another prisoner in the cell.

Shin had been granted a reprieve. Hong had confirmed his story. Shin would never see the school’s night guard again.

By the standards of Camp 14, Shin’s cellmate was notably old, somewhere around fifty. He refused to explain why he was locked up in the camp’s underground prison,
but he did say he had been there for many years and that he sorely missed the sun.

Pallid, leathery skin sagged over his fleshless bones. His name was Kim Jin Myung. He asked to be called ‘Uncle’.

Shin was in no condition to say much of anything for several weeks. Fever kept him curled up on the cold floor, where he expected to die. He could not eat and told his cellmate to take his food.
Uncle ate some of it, but only until the boy’s appetite returned.

In the meantime, Uncle went to work as Shin’s full-time nurse.

He turned mealtimes into thrice-daily medical treatments, using a wooden spoon as a squeegee on Shin’s infected blisters.

‘There’s a lot of pus here,’ he told Shin. ‘I’m going to scrape it away, so bear with me.’

He rubbed salty cabbage soup into the wounds as a disinfectant. He massaged Shin’s arms and legs so that his muscles would not atrophy. To prevent urine and faeces from coming into contact
with the boy’s wounds, he carried the cell’s chamber pot to Shin and hoisted him up so he could use it.

Shin guesses that this intensive care went on for about two months. He had a sense that Uncle had done this kind of work before, judging from his competence and calm.

On occasion, Shin and Uncle could hear the screams and moans of a prisoner being tortured. The room with the winch and the clubs seemed to be just down the corridor. Prison rules banned inmates
from talking. But in their cell, which was just large enough for Shin and Uncle to lie side by side, they could whisper. Shin discovered later that the guards knew about these conversations.

Uncle seemed to Shin to have a special standing with the guards. They cut his hair and loaned him scissors so he could trim his beard. They brought him cups of water. They told him the time of
day when he asked. They gave him extra food, much of which he shared with Shin.

‘Kid, you have a lot of days to live,’ Uncle said. ‘They say the sun shines even on mouse holes.’

The old man’s medical skills and caring words kept the boy alive. His fever waned, his mind cleared and his burns congealed into scars.

It was Shin’s first exposure to sustained kindness and he was grateful beyond words, but he also found it puzzling. He had not trusted his mother to keep him from starving. At school, he
had trusted no one, with the possible exception of Hong Sung Jo, and informed on everyone. In return, he expected abuse and betrayal. In the cell, Uncle slowly reconfigured those expectations. The
old man said he was lonely and seemed genuinely happy to share his space and meals with someone else. He never once angered or frightened Shin or undermined his recovery.

The routines of prison life following Shin’s interrogation and torture – discounting the screaming that periodically echoed down the prison corridor – were oddly
sustaining.

Other than nursing the boy, Uncle was a man of leisure. He exercised daily in his cell. He cut Shin’s hair. He was an entertaining talker, whose knowledge of North Korea
thrilled Shin, especially when the subject was food.

‘Uncle, tell me a story,’ Shin would say.

The old man described what food outside the fence looked, smelled and tasted like. Thanks to his loving descriptions of roasting pork, boiling chicken and eating clams at the seashore,
Shin’s appetite came back with a vengeance.

As his health improved, the guards began to call him out of the cell. They were now very much aware that Shin had snitched on his family and they pressed him to inform on the old man.

‘You two are in there together,’ a guard said to Shin. ‘What does he say? Don’t conceal anything.’

Back in the cell, Uncle wanted to know, ‘What did they ask you?’

Squeezed between his nurse and his jailers, Shin elected to tell the truth to both sides. He told Uncle that the guards had asked him to be an informer. This did not surprise the old man. He
continued to entertain Shin with long stories about good things to eat, but he did not volunteer biographical information. He would not talk about his family. He expressed no opinions about the
government.

Shin guessed – based on the way Uncle used language – that he had once been an important and well-educated man. But it was only a guess.

Although it was a crime to talk about escaping from Camp 14, it was not against the rules to fantasize about what life would be like if the government were to set you free. Uncle told Shin that
both of them would one day be released. Until then, he said, they had a sacred obligation to stay strong, live as long as possible and never consider suicide.

‘What do you think?’ Uncle would then ask Shin. ‘Do you believe I’ll also be able to make it out?’

Shin doubted it, but said nothing.

A guard unlocked the door of Shin’s cell and handed him the school uniform he had worn on the day he arrived in the underground prison.

‘Put on these clothes and come along quickly,’ the guard said.

As Shin changed, he asked Uncle what would happen. The old man assured him that he would be safe and that they would meet again on the outside.

‘Let me hold you once,’ he said, grasping both of Shin’s hands tightly.

Shin did not want to leave the cell. He had never trusted – never loved – anyone before. In the years ahead, he would think of the old man in the dark room far more often and with
far greater affection than he thought of his parents. But after the guards led him out of the cell and locked its door, he never saw Uncle again.

They took Shin to the big bare room where, in early April, he had first been interrogated. Now, it was late November. Shin had just turned fourteen. He had not seen the sun for
more than half a year.

What he saw in the room startled him: his father knelt in front of two interrogators who sat at their desks. He seemed much older and more careworn than before. He had been brought into the
underground prison at about the same time as Shin.

Kneeling beside him, Shin saw that his father’s right leg canted outwards in an unnatural way. Shin Gyung Sub had also been tortured. Below his knee, his leg bones had been broken and they
had knitted back together at an odd angle. The injury would end his relatively comfortable job as a camp mechanic and lathe operator. He would now have to hobble around as an unskilled labourer on
a construction crew.

During his time in the underground prison, the guards told Shin’s father that his youngest son had informed them of the escape plan. When Shin later had a chance to talk to his father
about this, the conversation was strained. His father said it was better to have told the guards than to have risked concealing the plan, but his caustic tone confused Shin. He sounded as if he
knew his son’s first instinct was to inform.

‘Read it and stamp it,’ one of the interrogators said, handing a document to Shin and one to his father.

It was a nondisclosure form stipulating that father and son would not tell anyone what had gone on inside the prison. If they did talk, the document said, they would be punished.

After pressing their inked thumbs to their respective forms, they were handcuffed, blindfolded and led outside to the elevator. Above ground, their cuffs and blindfolds still on, they were
guided into the backseat of a small car and driven away.

In the car, Shin guessed that he and his father would be released back into the camp’s population. The guards would not force them to sign a secrecy pledge and then shoot them. It did not
make sense. But when the car stopped after about thirty minutes and his blindfold was removed, he panicked.

A crowd had gathered at the empty wheat field near his mother’s house. This was the place where Shin had witnessed two or three executions a year since he was a toddler. A makeshift
gallows had been constructed and a wooden pole had been driven into the ground.

Shin was now certain that he and his father were to be executed. He became acutely aware of the air passing into and out of his lungs. He told himself these were the last breaths of his
life.

His panic subsided when a guard barked out his father’s name.

‘Hey, Gyung Sub. Go sit at the very front.’

Shin was told to go with his father. A guard removed their handcuffs. They sat down. The officer overseeing the execution began to speak. Shin’s mother and brother were dragged out.

Shin had not seen them or heard anything about their fate since he walked out of his mother’s house on the night he betrayed them.

‘Execute Jang Hye Gyung and Shin He Geun, traitors of the people,’ the senior officer said.

Shin looked at his father. He was weeping silently.

The shame Shin feels about the executions has been compounded over the years by the lies he began telling in South Korea.

‘There is nothing in my life to compare with this burden,’ Shin told me on the day in California when he explained how and why he had misrepresented his past.

But he was not ashamed on the day of the executions. He was angry. He hated his mother and brother with the savage clarity of a wronged and wounded adolescent.

As he saw it, he had been tortured and nearly died, and his father had been crippled, because of their foolish, self-centred scheming. And only minutes before he saw them on the execution
grounds, Shin had believed he would be shot because of their recklessness.

When guards dragged her to the gallows, Shin saw that his mother looked bloated. They forced her to stand on a wooden box, gagged her, tied her arms behind her back and tightened a noose around
her neck. They did not cover her swollen eyes.

She scanned the crowd and found Shin. He refused to hold her gaze.

When guards pulled away the box, she jerked about desperately. As he watched his mother struggle, Shin thought she deserved to die.

Shin’s brother looked gaunt and frail as guards tied him to the wooden post. Three guards fired their rifles three times. Bullets snapped the rope that held his forehead to the pole. It
was a bloody, brain-splattered mess of a killing, a spectacle that sickened and frightened Shin. But he thought his brother, too, had deserved it.

Executions of parents for attempted escape were not uncommon in Camp 14. Shin witnessed several before and after his mother’s hanging. It wasn’t clear, though, what
happened to the children they left behind in the camp. As far as Shin could determine, none of these children was allowed to go to school.