Escape from Camp 14

Introduction

Nine years after his mother’s hanging, Shin squirmed through an electric fence and ran off through the snow. It was 2 January 2005. Before then, no one born in a North Korean political prison camp had ever escaped. As far as can be determined, Shin is still the only one to do so.

He was twenty-three years old and knew no one outside the fence.

Within a month, he had walked into China. Within two years, he was living in South Korea. Four years later, he was living in southern California and was a senior ambassador at Liberty in North Korea (LiNK), an American human rights group.

His name is now Shin Dong-hyuk. He changed it after arriving in South Korea in an attempt to reinvent himself as a free man. He is handsome, with quick, wary eyes. A Los Angeles dentist has done work on his teeth, which he could not brush in the camp. His overall physical health is excellent. His body, though, is a roadmap of the hardships of growing up in a labour camp that the North Korean government insists does not exist.

Stunted by malnutrition, he is short and slight — five feet six inches and about one hundred and twenty pounds. His arms are bowed from childhood labour. His lower back and buttocks are scarred with burns from the torturer’s fire. The skin over his pubis bears a puncture scar from the hook used to hold him in place over the fire. His ankles are scarred by shackles, from which he was hung upside down in solitary confinement. His right middle finger is cut off at the first knuckle, a guard’s punishment for dropping a sewing machine in a camp garment factory. His shins, from ankle to knee on both legs, are mutilated and scarred by burns from the electrified barbed-wire fence that failed to keep him inside Camp 14.

Shin is roughly the same age as Kim Jong Eun, the chubby third son of Kim Jong Il who took over as leader after his father’s death in 2011. As contemporaries, Shin and Kim Jong Eun personify the antipodes of privilege and privation in North Korea, a nominally classless society where, in fact, breeding and bloodlines decide everything.

Kim Jong Eun was born a communist prince and raised behind palace walls. He was educated under an assumed name in Switzerland and returned to North Korea to study in an elite university named after his grandfather. Because of his parentage, he lives above the law. For him, everything is possible. In 2010, he was named a four-star general in the Korean People’s Army despite a total lack of field experience in the military. A year later, after his father died of a sudden heart attack, state media in North Korea described him as ‘another leader sent from heaven’. He may, however, be forced to share his earthly dictatorship with older relatives and military leaders.

Shin was born a slave and raised behind a high-voltage barbed-wire fence. He was educated in a camp school to read and count at a rudimentary level. Because his blood was tainted by the perceived crimes of his father’s brothers, he lived below the law. For him, nothing was possible. His state-prescribed career trajectory was hard labour and an early death from disease brought on by chronic hunger — all without a charge or a trial or an appeal, and all in secrecy.

In stories of concentration camp survival, there is a conventional narrative arc. Security forces steal the protagonist away from a loving family and a comfortable home. To survive, he abandons moral principles, suppresses feelings for others and ceases to be a civilized human being.

In perhaps the most celebrated of these stories, Night, by Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel, the thirteen-year-old narrator explains his torment with an account of the normal life that existed before he and his family were packed aboard trains bound for Nazi death camps. Wiesel studied the Talmud daily. His father owned a store and watched over their village in Romania. His grandfather was always present to celebrate the Jewish holidays. But after the boy’s entire family perished in the camps, Wiesel was left ‘alone, terribly alone in a world without God, without man. Without love or mercy.’

Shin’s story of survival is different.

His mother beat him and his father, who was allowed by guards to sleep with his mother just five nights a year, ignored him. His brother was a stranger. Children in the camp were untrustworthy and abusive. Before he learned anything else, Shin learned to survive by snitching on all of them.

Love and mercy and family were words without meaning. God did not disappear or die. Shin had never heard of him.

In a preface to Night, Wiesel wrote that an adolescent’s knowledge of death and evil ‘should be limited to what one discovers in literature’.

In Camp 14, Shin did not know literature existed. He saw only one book in the camp, a Korean grammar text, in the hands of a teacher who wore a guard’s uniform, carried a revolver on his hip and beat one of his primary school classmates to death with a chalkboard pointer.

Unlike those who have survived a concentration camp, Shin had not been torn away from a civilized existence and forced to descend into hell. He was born and raised there. He accepted its values. He called it home.

North Korea’s labour camps have now existed for twice as long as the Soviet Gulag and about twelve times longer than the Nazi concentration camps. There is no dispute about where these camps are. High-resolution satellite photographs, accessible on Google Earth to anyone with an Internet connection, show vast fenced compounds sprawling through the rugged mountains of North Korea.

The South Korean government estimates that there are about one hundred and fifty-four thousand prisoners in the camps, while the US State Department and several human rights groups have put the number as high as two hundred thousand. After examining a decade of satellite images of the camps, Amnesty International noticed new construction inside the camps in 2011 and became concerned that the inmate population was increasing, perhaps to short-circuit possible unrest as power began to shift from Kim Jong Il to his young and untried son.[1]

There are six camps, according to South Korea’s intelligence agency and human rights groups. The biggest is thirty-one miles long and twenty-five miles wide, an area larger than the city of Los Angeles. Electrified, barbed-wire fences — reinforced by guard towers and patrolled by armed men — encircle most of the camps. Two of them, numbers 15 and 18, have re-education zones where some fortunate detainees receive remedial instruction in the teachings of Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung. If prisoners memorize enough of these teachings and convince guards they are loyal, they can be released, but they are monitored for the rest of their lives by state security. The remaining camps are ‘complete control districts’ where prisoners, who are called ‘irredeemables’,[2] are worked to death.

Shin’s camp, number 14, is a complete control district. By reputation it is the toughest of them all because of its particularly brutal working conditions, the vigilance of its guards and the state’s unforgiving view of the seriousness of the crimes committed by its inmates, many of whom are purged officials from the ruling party, the government and the military, along with their families. Established around 1959 in central North Korea — near Kaechon County in South Pyongan Province — Camp 14 holds an estimated fifteen thousand prisoners. About thirty miles long and fifteen miles wide, it has farms, mines and factories threaded through steep mountain valleys.

Although Shin is the only person born in a labour camp to escape and tell his story, there are at least twenty-six other labour camp eyewitnesses who are now in the free world.[3] They include at least fifteen North Koreans who were imprisoned in Camp 15’s edification district, and who won their release and later turned up in South Korea. Former guards from other camps have also found their way to South Korea. Kim Yong, a former North Korean lieutenant colonel from a privileged background in Pyongyang, spent six years in two camps before escaping in a coal train.

A distillation of their testimony by the Korean Bar Association in Seoul paints a detailed picture of daily life in the camps. A few prisoners are publicly executed every year. Others are beaten to death or secretly murdered by guards, who have almost complete license to abuse and rape prisoners. Most prisoners tend crops, mine coal, sew military uniforms, or make cement while subsisting on a near-starvation diet of corn, cabbage and salt. They lose their teeth, their gums turn black, their bones weaken and, as they enter their forties, they hunch over at the waist. Issued a set of clothes once or twice a year, they commonly work and sleep in filthy rags, living without soap, socks, gloves, underclothes, or toilet paper. Twelve- to fifteen-hour workdays are mandatory until prisoners die, usually of malnutrition-related illnesses, before they turn fifty.[4] Although precise numbers are impossible to obtain, Western governments and human rights groups estimate that hundreds of thousands of people have perished in these camps.

Most North Koreans are sent to the camps without any judicial process, and many die there without learning the charges against them. They are taken from their homes, usually at night, by the Bowibu, the National Security Agency. Guilt by association is legal in North Korea. A wrongdoer is often imprisoned with his parents and children. Kim Il Sung laid down the law in 1972: ‘[E]nemies of class, whoever they are, their seed must be eliminated through three generations.’

My first encounter with Shin was at lunch in the winter of 2008. We met in a Korean restaurant in downtown Seoul. Talkative and hungry, he wolfed down several helpings of rice and beef. As he ate, he told my translator and me what it was like to watch as his mother was hanged. He blamed her for his torture in the camp, and he went out of his way to say that he was still furious with her. He said he had not been a ‘good son’, but would not explain why.

During his years in the camp he said he had never once heard the word ‘love’, certainly not from his mother, a woman he continued to despise, even in death. He had heard about the concept of forgiveness in a South Korean church, but it confused him. To ask for forgiveness in Camp 14, he said, was ‘to beg not to be punished’.

He had written a memoir about the camp, but it had received little attention in South Korea. He was jobless, broke, behind on his rent and uncertain what to do next. The rules of Camp 14 had prevented him, on pain of execution, from having intimate contact with a woman. He now wanted to find a proper girlfriend, but said he didn’t know how to begin looking for one.

After lunch, he took me to the small, sad apartment in Seoul that he could not afford. Although he would not look me in the eye, he showed me his chopped-off finger and his scarred back. He allowed me to take his photograph. Despite all the hardship he had endured he still had a baby face. He was twenty-six years old — three years out of Camp 14.

I was fifty-six years old at that memorable lunch. As a correspondent for the Washington Post in Northeast Asia, I had been searching for more than a year for a story that could explain how North Korea used repression to keep from falling apart.

Political implosion had become my specialty. For the Post and for the New York Times, I spent nearly three decades covering failed states in Africa, the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the breakup of Yugoslavia and the slow-motion rot in Burma under the generals. From the outside looking in, North Korea seemed ripe — indeed, overripe — for the kind of collapse I had witnessed elsewhere. In a part of the world where nearly everyone else was getting rich, its people were increasingly isolated, poor and hungry.

Still, the Kim family dynasty kept the lid on. Totalitarian repression preserved their basket-case state.

The problem with showing how they did it was lack of access. Elsewhere in the world, repressive states are not always successful in sealing their borders. I had been able to work openly in Mengistu’s Ethiopia, Mobutu’s Congo and Milosevic’s Serbia, and had slipped in as a tourist to write about Burma.

North Korea was much more careful. Foreign reporters, especially Americans, were rarely allowed inside. I visited North Korea only once, saw what my minders wanted me to see and learned little. If journalists entered illegally, they risked months or years of imprisonment as spies. To win release, they sometimes needed the help of a former American president.[5]

Given these restrictions, most reporting about North Korea was distant and hollow. Written from Seoul or Tokyo or Beijing, stories began with an account of Pyongyang’s latest provocation, such as sinking a ship or shooting a tourist. Then the dreary conventions of journalism kicked in: American and South Korean officials expressed outrage. Chinese officials called for restraint. Think-tank experts opined about what it might mean. I wrote more than my share of these pieces.

Shin, though, shattered these conventions. His life unlocked the door, allowing outsiders to see how the Kim family sustained itself with child slavery and murder. A few days after we met, Shin’s appealing picture and appalling story ran prominently on the front page of the Washington Post.

‘Wow,’ wrote Donald G. Graham, chairman of the Washington Post Company, in a one-word e-mail I received the morning after the story appeared. A German filmmaker, who happened to be visiting Washington’s Holocaust Memorial Museum on the day the story was published, decided to make a documentary about Shin’s life. The Washington Post ran an editorial saying that the brutality Shin endured was horrifying, but just as horrifying was the world’s indifference to the existence of North Korea’s labour camps.

‘High school students in America debate why President Franklin D. Roosevelt didn’t bomb the rail lines to Hitler’s camps,’ the editorial concluded. ‘Their children may ask, a generation from now, why the West stared at far clearer satellite images of Kim Jong Il’s camps, and did nothing.’

Shin’s story seemed to get under the skin of ordinary readers. They wrote letters and sent e-mails, offering money, housing and prayers.

My article had only skimmed the surface of Shin’s life. It struck me that a deeper account would unveil the secret machinery that enforces totalitarian rule in North Korea. It would also show, through the details of Shin’s improbable flight, how some of that oppressive machinery is breaking down, allowing an unworldly young escapee to wander undetected across a police state and into China. Just as importantly, no one who read a book about a boy bred by North Korea to be worked to death could ever ignore the existence of the camps.

I asked Shin if he was interested. It took him nine months to make up his mind. During those months, human rights activists in South Korea, Japan and the United States urged him to cooperate, telling him that a book in English would raise world awareness, increase international pressure on North Korea and perhaps put some much needed money in his pocket. After Shin said yes, he made himself available for seven rounds of interviews, first in Seoul, then in Torrance, California, and finally in Seattle, Washington. Shin and I agreed to a fifty-fifty split of whatever the book might earn. Our agreement, though, gave me control over the contents.

Shin began keeping a diary in early 2006, about a year after his escape from North Korea. In Seoul, after he was hospitalized for depression, he continued writing in it. The diary became the basis for his Korean-language memoir, Escape to the Outside World, which was published in Seoul in 2007 by the Database Center for North Korean Human Rights.

The memoir was a starting point for our interviews. It was also the source for many of the direct quotations that are attributed in this book to Shin, his family, friends and prison keepers during the time he was in North Korea and China. But every thought and action attributed to Shin in these pages is based on multiple interviews with him, during which he expanded upon and, in many crucial instances, corrected his Korean memoir.

Even as he cooperated, Shin seemed to dread talking to me. I often felt like a dentist drilling without anaesthetic. The drilling went on intermittently for more than two years. Some of our sessions were cathartic for him, but many made him depressed.

He struggled to trust me. As he readily admits, he struggles to trust anyone. It is an inescapable part of how he was raised. Guards taught him to sell out his parents and friends, and he assumes everyone he meets will, in turn, sell him out.

While Shin remained wary of me, he responded to every question about his past that I could think of. His life can seem incredible, but it echoes the experiences of other former prisoners in the camps, as well as the accounts of former camp guards.

‘Everything Shin has said is consistent with what I have heard about the camps,’ said David Hawk, a human rights specialist who has interviewed Shin and more than two dozen other former labour camp prisoners for ‘The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps’, a report that links survivor accounts with annotated satellite images. It was first published in 2003 by the US Committee for Human Rights in North Korea and has been updated as more testimony and higher-resolution satellite images became available. Hawk told me that because Shin was born and raised in a camp, he knows things that other camp survivors do not. Shin’s story has also been vetted by the authors of the Korean Bar Association’s ‘White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea’. They conducted extensive interviews with Shin, as well as with other known camp survivors who were willing to talk. As Hawk has written, the only way for North Korea to ‘refute, contradict, or invalidate’ the testimony of Shin and other camp survivors would be to permit outside experts to visit the camps. Otherwise, Hawk declares, their testimony stands.

If North Korea does collapse, Shin may be correct in predicting that its leaders, fearing war crimes trials, will demolish the camps before investigators can get to them. As Kim Jong Il explained, ‘We must envelope our environment in a dense fog to prevent our enemies from learning anything about us.’[6]

To try to piece together what I could not see, I spent the better part of three years reporting about North Korea’s military, leadership, economy, food shortages and human rights abuses. I interviewed scores of North Korean defectors, including three former inmates of Camp 15 and a former camp guard and driver who worked at four labour camps. I spoke to South Korean scholars and technocrats who travel regularly inside North Korea, and I reviewed the growing body of scholarly research on and personal memoirs about the camps. In the United States, I conducted extended interviews with Korean Americans who have become Shin’s closest friends.

In assessing Shin’s story, one should keep in mind that many others in the camps have endured similar or worse hardships. According to An Myeong Chul, a former camp guard and driver, ‘Shin had a relatively comfortable life by the standards of other children in the camps.’

By exploding nuclear bombs, attacking South Korea and cultivating a reputation for hair-trigger belligerence, the government of North Korea has stirred up a semi-permanent security emergency on the Korean Peninsula.

When North Korea deigns to enter into international diplomacy, it has always succeeded in shoving human rights off the negotiating table. Crisis management, usually focused on nuclear weapons and missiles, has dominated American dealings with the North.

The labour camps have been an afterthought.

‘Talking to them about the camps is something that has not been possible,’ David Straub, who worked in the State Department during the Clinton and Bush years as a senior official responsible for North Korea policy, told me. ‘They go nuts when you talk about it.’

The camps have barely pricked the world’s collective conscience. In the United States, newspaper stories notwithstanding, ignorance of their existence remains widespread. For several years in Washington, a handful of North Korean defectors and camp survivors gathered each spring on the Mall for speeches and marches. The Washington press corps paid little attention. Part of the reason was language. Most of the defectors spoke only Korean. As important, in a media culture that feeds on celebrity, no movie star, pop idol or Nobel Prize winner stepped forward to demand that outsiders invest emotionally in a distant issue that lacks good video footage.

‘Tibetans have the Dalai Lama and Richard Gere, Burmese have Aung San Suu Kyi, Darfurians have Mia Farrow and George Clooney,’ Suzanne Scholte, a long-time activist who brought camp survivors to Washington, told me. ‘North Koreans have no one like that.’

Shin told me he does not deserve to speak for the tens of thousands still in the camps. He is ashamed of what he did to survive and escape. He has resisted learning English, in part because he does not want to have to tell his story again and again in a language that might make him important. But he desperately wants the world to understand what North Korea has tried so diligently to hide. His burden is a heavy one. No one else born and raised in the camps has escaped to explain what went on inside — what still goes on inside.