Long Road Home: Testimony of a North Korean Camp Survivor (15 page)

A close-up satellite image of Camp No. 14. It features the National Security Agency headquarters where Kim Yong was brought upon his arrival in 1993. Also featured is an entrance to the coal mine where Kim Yong labored more than 12 hours a day.

“Fucking traitor, it’s you again, you delay everyone’s work! A filthy bastard plotting sabotage, huh?” As soon as he was done with verbal abuse, he smacked my head with the butt of a gun and I lost consciousness immediately. When I woke up, the head of our work unit was putting bandages on my head. As punishment, the guards reduced the portion of my meal by half for two days. A normal portion was not even a handful of boiled corn kernels and wheat, which was already so insufficient that prisoners who ate only the rationed food died of hunger. So when it was reduced to half, I could easily count the grains of boiled wheat and corn kernels. The head of our work unit, a kind elderly man, voluntarily shared his portion with me for two days and kept telling me, “Please eat and don’t die, you have to eat to survive.”

I was simply speechless. Despite his kind words, I spent the next month and a half contemplating how to end this miserable existence. I decided to commit suicide. It had been two and a half months since I had arrived at No. 14. The thought of dying was overwhelming, but I hoped everything would end like a bad dream and finally I wouldn’t have to start another day like this, worried about mine collapse and sudden kicks in the head. The following day, all I could think of was how to carry out my plan. Coming up with a way to do it wasn’t as easy as making up my mind to commit suicide. But by the end of the day, I had an idea. After work, when the miners ascended to the surface in the metal containers, I carried out my plan. Each container was pulled up by sets of wires that were connected by safety pins. As I reached about 2,000 feet above the mining ground, I pulled out a pin from a wire. I only heard a sharp breeze cutting my ears and then lost consciousness. When I woke up, I was lying in a pool of blood in the stream that flowed at the very bottom of the shaft. The head of our work unit had once again wrapped my head with a piece of cloth. His arms were supporting my head. The kind man was looking down at me with teary eyes.

“It’s a miracle that you even opened your eyes. I thought you were surely not with us anymore.” Endless tears kept rolling over his bony cheeks and fell onto my face. My vision was blurry.

Even in my delirious state, I felt utter disappointment more than deadly pain. How was I still alive to continue on in this hellish place after falling straight down to 2,000 feet below ground? That plunge should have killed me, but apparently, the speed diminished as the container hit the walls a few times, making circles while it descended. Moreover, the container flipped and I was tossed out into the stream, which minimized the injury. When I woke up, I regretted that I could not find a better way to really put an end to this indescribable torment.

There was simply no way of escaping Camp No. 14. It was located in a valley surrounded by high mountains. At rare times when prisoners had a chance to see the sky in the daytime, they saw hundreds of crows circling over the valley. They would flock together and cry out, “kaw, kaw.” In Korean tradition, crows are not auspicious birds but ominous symbols. But the prisoners liked the crows’ cry, since it sounded like “
ga, ga
,” which means “go, go” in Korean. It seemed as if these birds pitied us for being in captivity and wanted us to be free. I still feel the same sensation of despair when I hear the crows cry.

Dear crows, flying high and free,

Do not pity us slaving away to death.

Even though our bodies are in bondage

Our spirit is still alive.

Already thirty-five years passed at this camp,

With time my tears flow like a river.

The prisoners started to sing this song, composed by an anonymous predecessor, when they were brought out to work on a road expansion project. Road construction work was much better than mining because at least we could breathe fresh air. But these types of special projects were rare and didn’t last long. While I was working on the road, I encountered two Caucasian prisoners who looked like they were in their late sixties or seventies. They were just like the Korean prisoners—leathery skin and bones. The only difference was that their noses were bigger and their eyes were colored. I saw them from two or three yards away. One of them had a totally bent back. I couldn’t figure out why they were there, but they might have been prisoners in the Korean War and have spent a long time in the camp. During the special road expansion project, I also had a chance to see women for the first time since I had been arrested. They were as skinny as chopsticks and had absolutely no breasts. But among the crowd there were some women in better condition. They must have been working at the pigsty and stealing animal feed or working in the kitchen. Or they might have been receiving food scraps from the guards for snitching. There was simply no way for me to know.

As soon as the construction ended, large military trucks started to come in and out of the medical facilities on the other side of the hill using the newly expanded road. The prisoners believed that live prisoners were used for medical experimentation. Crows would flock over the hill and cry, flying in circles over the suspected medical laboratory. All the large military trucks, with hatches covering their backs, came in and out at night. To my eyes trained in foreign trade, it looked like they were carrying freezers in the back. But there was no way for me to verify what the trucks were transporting, or whether live human bodies were really being used for experiments. The prisoners assumed so because there were regular medical checkups, after which the relatively healthy ones were taken away. They never came back. It was also common knowledge that the guards who worked at the medical facility often had retarded children with birth defects. Even the toughest guards avoided Camp No. 14 for reasons like this, and the ones who were sent there were the most merciless.

In addition to enduring backbreaking labor, prisoners were supposed to submit written criticisms of other prisoners four times a week and self-criticisms twice a week. This was done during the daily study session at night, when everyone was in complete delirium, fading away into sleep. At times, criticism would take the form of a public presentation. Only on Sundays were we free from this ritual, due to the rotation of security guards. There was really nothing to confess, but we all had to come up with something in order to avoid severe punishment. Writing self-criticism was hard labor of the mind. Some prisoners used the occasion to receive more food. When they submitted particularly important information about society, the guards offered them a full bowl of corn. Everyone was so hungry, but some weaker ones submitted false self-accusations to get an immediate reprieve from unbearable hunger, even though they knew they would soon be punished for the confessed imaginary wrongdoings. Another psychological punishment was the complete absence of any kind of media—newspapers, TV, radio, there was nothing at Camp No. 14. The separation from the rest of the world was unbearable. On rare occasions when the authorities wanted to reward the prisoners, they played popular songs, such as “Arirang” and “Moranbong,” from loudspeakers. That was the most festive thing prisoners were treated to.

There were threats and dangers everywhere, but our worst enemy was hunger. Eating enough to survive was a war in itself, since each meal consisted of watery soup and a handful of boiled corn kernels and wheat. It was impossible to live on that portion, not to mention work twelve to fourteen hours a day in a coal mine. Prisoners died of malnutrition all the time. Miners were so weak that it took them an hour to do the work that would have taken a normal person ten minutes. The hunger was so severe that even rats disappeared almost completely from the camp. The rats were fairly big, and were regarded as a special treat and a source of protein for the lucky ones who caught them. The guards prohibited this, because it was believed that rats were good at predicting mine shaft collapses. One day, I spotted a huge rat while carrying lumber to support the ceiling of the shaft. I knocked it out with a stone and ate it immediately from head to tail, raw, without skinning it. The meat tasted like honey. On another lucky day, I picked up a zucchini on the road near the barracks. A farmer supplying produce for the guards might have dropped it from his cart. I was never fond of zucchini before my imprisonment, but that raw one was so delicious.

One evening I saw that a worker in our unit had found a small snake in the mining area, stoned it, and wanted to eat it. But he was so weak that he could not hold the snake tightly when he put its tail in his mouth. Not quite dead, the snake escaped his hands and bit him, but he was still eating the other end. The other prisoners jumped to grab parts of the snake and gorged on them. The man died two days later. In the camp area there was farmland irrigated by oxen, which were cared for by outside contract laborers. When they passed by the camp on the ox carts, the famished prisoners would go after the animal dung to dig out undigested corn kernels. Anything that moved was eaten—grasshoppers, lice … anything and everything in order to survive. On one lucky day a rabbit got lost and came into the shaft. Everyone went crazy. We knocked its head with a stone and ate the whole thing raw. Had the guards known about it, we would have been severely punished. But everyone was insanely hungry all the time. Luckily, since infancy, I had been trained to eat just the allocated portion at the orphanage, and this habit continued well into my military days. So I was more accustomed to enduring hunger between meals than others. Outside the camp, people received special meals on the birthdays of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, but inside, there was no such thing. The only special treat I remember receiving was the shells left over after beans had been crushed to make oil. They were as hard as a rock and were usually given to farm animals, but when the prisoners received bits, it was an occasion to celebrate. The bean shells themselves were disgusting, but any change from boiled corn and wheat was very welcome. In this place where everyone was half delirious from perpetual hunger, working in the kitchen was a huge privilege. One could at least eat enough corn. Security guards would reserve these highly coveted positions for their snitchers.

The most tragic of all memories related to hunger in the camp is of a man named Myeong-cheol, who was a meek and kindhearted person. We worked in the same team, so I knew him personally. One fall morning we were marching toward a work site, accompanied by the armed guards as usual. No. 14 was located in a deep valley covered with chestnut trees. In the fall, chestnuts were dropping from the trees left and right. The family members of the guards would bring out sacks to stuff them with chestnuts, but when the starved prisoners attempted to collect some, they were immediately shot to death. That day Myeong-cheol could not resist the temptation and stepped out of line to grab a chestnut. It must have taken only a split second, but an accompanying guard saw him and smacked his head with a rifle butt. The weak man immediately fell to the ground.

“Beast of the worst kind, whoever told you to grab a chestnut?” The ruthless voice resounded harshly in everyone’s ears. As soon as the guard finished his sentence, he pulled his trigger. The next second, we all saw how the prisoner’s head had exploded.

“Throw the bastard away out of sight,” the guard indifferently yelled at two other prisoners. Even though everyone was used to sudden deaths, this particular one was shocking for the guard’s explosive brutality. The dead man was tightly holding a chestnut as he was dragged to the burial ground, leaving dark scarlet marks of blood as his last trace on earth.

There was another unforgettable incident related to hunger in Camp No. 14, an accident: the shaft collapsed and five prisoners were buried alive. When we dragged them out, they were already dead. We were told to wrap the dead bodies in straw mats and discard them, but two of our team members were so hungry that they cut off a leg from a dead body and hid it in the shaft. They came back to eat the raw flesh the following day. They were discovered by the guards, who immediately shot them to death.

Just like in real society, the camp had a definitely established hierarchy among the population, with the stronger ones coercing and manipulating the weaker ones. Strong prisoners would not usually go out of their way to punish anyone who irritated them. A strong one would order his retinue to pick on the opponent and wait until the opponent joined the fight. Only then did the strong one jump in to restore order and punish his opponent. Usually at that point, security guards would intervene and punish the weaker prisoner for initiating the trouble. As this process was repeated, the weaker opponent learned not to bother the stronger ones. The stronger ones were better fed as well. They received tribute from the prisoners who worked in the kitchen, many of whom had earned their jobs by informing on others. They needed the strong ones to protect them from other resentful prisoners. The guards knew this very well and therefore did not punish the exploitative ones. In fact, the strong prisoners functioned like assistant guards appointed by the real guards, living and working with the prisoners.

But not all the guards were cruel. The elderly ones who had been around a long time were not so strict about the rules. It was the younger ones who were mostly cruel and abusive. They had plenty of energy to wield their iron fists and vent their anger on prisoners. However, I remember one particular man who guarded our work unit, a young chap. Sometimes he would subtly reward prisoners upon whom he wished to bestow favor. When we were working in the mine, he would smoke nearby. Since I had been a chain smoker before entering the camp, the smell of a burning cigarette would painfully bring back the days when I was living a normal life in society. Amid backbreaking labor, I would have reveries about my past, triggered by the guard’s cigarette smoke. At such moments, the guard’s occasional complaint snapped me out of my daydreams.