Escape from Camp 14

1

Shin and his mother lived in the best prisoner quarters Camp 14 had to offer: a ‘model village’ next to an orchard and just across from the field where his mother was later hanged.

Each of the forty one-storey buildings in the village housed four families. Shin and his mother had their own room, where they slept side by side on a concrete floor. The four families shared a common kitchen, which had a single bare light bulb. Electricity ran for two hours a day, from four to five in the morning and ten to eleven at night. Windows were made of grey vinyl too opaque to see through. Rooms were heated in the Korean way by a coal fire in the kitchen with flues running under the bedroom floor. The camp had its own coal mines and coal for heating was readily available.

There were no beds, chairs or tables. There was no running water. No bath or shower. Prisoners who wanted to bathe sometimes sneaked down to the river in the summer. About thirty families shared a well for drinking water. They also shared a privy, which was divided in half for men and women. Defecating and urinating there was mandatory, as human waste was used as fertilizer on the camp farm.

If Shin’s mother met her daily work quota, she could bring home food for that night and the following day. At four in the morning, she would prepare breakfast and lunch for her son and for herself. Every meal was the same: corn porridge, pickled cabbage and cabbage soup. Shin ate this meal nearly every day for twenty-three years, unless he was denied food as punishment.

When he was still too young for school, his mother often left him alone in the house in the morning, and came back from the fields at midday for lunch. Shin was always hungry and he would eat his lunch as soon as his mother left for work in the morning.

He also ate her lunch.

When she came back at midday and found nothing to eat, she would become furious and beat her son with a hoe, a shovel, anything that was close at hand. Some of the beatings were as violent as those he later received from the guards.

Still, Shin took as much food as he could from his mother as often as he could. It did not occur to him that if he ate her lunch she would go hungry. Many years later, after she was dead and he was living in the United States, he would tell me that he loved his mother. But that was in retrospect. That was after he had learned that a civilized child should love his mother. When he was in the camp — depending upon her for all his meals, stealing her food, enduring her beatings — he saw her as competition for survival.

Her name was Jang Hye Gyung. Shin remembers her as small and slightly plump with powerful arms. She wore her hair cut short, like all women in the camp, and was required to cover her head with a white cloth folded into a triangle that tied around the back of her neck. Shin discovered her birth date — 1 October 1950 — from a document he saw during his interrogation in the underground prison.

She never talked to him about her past, her family, or why she was in the camp, and he never asked. His existence as her son had been arranged by the guards. They chose her and the man who became Shin’s father as prizes for each other in a ‘reward’ marriage.

Single men and women slept in dormitories segregated by sex. The eighth rule of Camp 14, as Shin was required to memorize it, said, ‘Should sexual physical contact occur without prior approval, the perpetrators will be shot immediately.’

Rules were the same in other North Korean labour camps. If unauthorized sex resulted in a pregnancy or a birth, the woman and her baby were usually killed, according to my interviews with a former camp guard and several former prisoners. They said that women who had sex with guards in an attempt to get more food or easier work knew that the risks were high. If they became pregnant, they disappeared.

A reward marriage was the only safe way around the no-sex rule. Marriage was dangled in front of prisoners as the ultimate bonus for hard work and reliable snitching. Men became eligible at twenty-five, women at twenty-three. Guards announced marriages three or four times a year, usually on propitious dates, such as New Year’s Day or Kim Jong Il’s birthday. Neither bride nor groom had much say in deciding whom they would marry. If one partner found his or her chosen mate to be unacceptably old, cruel, or ugly, guards would sometimes cancel a marriage. If they did, neither the man nor the woman would be allowed to marry again.

Shin’s father, Shin Gyung Sub, told Shin that the guards gave him Jang as payment for his skill in operating a metal lathe in the camp’s machine shop. Shin’s mother never told Shin why she had been given the honour of marriage.

But for her, as for many brides in the camp, marriage was a kind of promotion. It came with a slightly better job and better housing — in the model village, where there was a school and health clinic. Shortly after her marriage, she was transferred there from a crowded dormitory for women in the camp’s garment factory. Jang was also given a coveted job on a nearby farm, where there were opportunities to steal corn, rice and green vegetables.

After their marriage, the couple was allowed to sleep together for five consecutive nights. From then on, Shin’s father, who continued to live in a dormitory at his work site, was permitted to visit Jang a few times a year. Their liaison produced two sons. The eldest, Shin He Geun, was born in 1974. Shin was born eight years later.

The brothers barely knew each other. When Shin was born, his older brother was away in primary school for ten hours a day. By the time Shin was four, his brother had moved out of the house (at the mandatory age of twelve) and into a dormitory.

As for his father, Shin remembers that he sometimes showed up at night and left early in the morning. He paid little attention to the boy, and Shin grew up indifferent to his presence.

In the years after he escaped the camp, Shin learned that many people associate warmth, security and affection with the words ‘mother’, ‘father’ and ‘brother’. That was not his experience. The guards taught him and the other children in the camp that they were prisoners because of the ‘sins’ of their parents. The children were told that while they should always be ashamed of their traitorous blood, they could go a long way towards ‘washing away’ their inherent sinfulness by working hard, obeying the guards and informing on their parents. The tenth rule of Camp 14 said that a prisoner ‘must truly’ consider each guard as his teacher. That made sense to Shin. As a child and teenager, his parents were exhausted, distant and uncommunicative.

Shin was a scrawny, incurious and for the most part friendless child whose one source of certainty was the guards’ lectures about redemption through snitching. His understanding of right and wrong, though, was often muddied by encounters he witnessed between his mother and the camp guards.

When he was ten, Shin left his house one evening and went looking for his mother. He was hungry and it was time for her to prepare dinner. He walked to a nearby rice field where his mother worked and asked a woman if she had seen her.

‘She’s cleaning the bowijidowon’s room,’ the woman told him, referring to the office of the guard in charge of the rice farm.

Shin walked to the guard’s office and found the front door locked. He peeked through a window on the side of the building. His mother was on her knees cleaning the floor. As Shin watched, the bowijidowon came into view. He approached Shin’s mother from behind and began to grope her. She offered no resistance. Both of them removed their clothes. Shin watched them have sex.

He never asked his mother about what he saw, and he never mentioned it to his father.

That same year, students in Shin’s class at primary school were required to volunteer to help their parents at work. He joined his mother one morning to plant rice seedlings. She seemed unwell and fell behind in her planting. Shortly before the lunch break, her slack pace caught the eye of a guard.

‘You bitch,’ he shouted at her.

‘Bitch’ was the standard form of address when camp guards spoke to female prisoners, while Shin and the other male prisoners were called sons of bitches.

‘How are you able to stuff your face when you can’t even plant rice?’ the guard asked.

She apologized, but the guard grew increasingly angry.

‘This bitch won’t do,’ he shouted.

As Shin stood beside his mother, the guard invented a punishment for her.

‘Go kneel on that ridge there and raise your arms. Stay in that position until I come back from lunch.’

Shin’s mother knelt on the ridge in the sun for an hour and a half, arms reaching for the sky. The boy stood nearby and watched. He did not know what to say to her so he said nothing.

When the guard returned, he ordered Shin’s mother back to work. Weak and hungry, she passed out in the middle of the afternoon. Shin ran to the guard, begging him for help. Other workers dragged his mother to a shaded rest area, where she regained consciousness.

That evening, Shin went with his mother to an ‘ideological struggle’ meeting, a compulsory gathering for self-criticism. Shin’s mother again fell to her knees at the meeting as forty of her fellow farm workers followed the bowijidowon’s lead and berated her for failing to fill her work quota.

On summer nights, Shin and some of the other small boys in his village would sneak into the orchard just north of the cluster of concrete dwellings where they lived. They picked unripe pears and cucumbers and ate them as quickly as they could. When they were caught, guards would beat them with batons and ban them from lunch at school for several days.

Guards, though, did not care if Shin and his friends ate rats, frogs, snakes and insects. They were intermittently abundant in the sprawling camp, which used few pesticides, relied on human waste as fertilizer, and supplied no water for cleaning privies or taking baths.

Eating rats not only filled empty stomachs, it was essential to survival. Their flesh could help prevent pellagra, a sometimes fatal disease that was rampant in the camp, especially in the winter. Prisoners with pellagra, the result of a lack of protein and niacin in their diets, suffered weakness, skin lesions, diarrhoea and dementia. It was a frequent cause of death.

Catching and roasting rats became a passion for Shin. He caught them in his house, in the fields and in the privy. He would meet his friends in the evening at his primary school, where there was a coal grill to roast them. Shin peeled away their skin, scraped away their innards, salted what was left and chewed the rest — flesh, bones and tiny feet.

He also learned to use the stems of foxtail grass to spear grasshoppers, longheaded locusts and dragonflies, which he roasted over a fire in late summer and autumn. In the mountain forests, where groups of students were often sent to gather wood, Shin ate wild grapes, gooseberries and Korean raspberries by the fistful.

During winter, spring and early summer, there was much less to eat. Hunger drove him and his boyhood friends to try strategies that older prisoners in the camp claimed could ease the discomfort of an empty stomach. They ate meals without water or soup, under the theory that liquid accelerated digestion and quickened the return of hunger pangs. They also tried to refrain from defecating, believing that this would make them feel full and less obsessed with food. An alternative hunger-fighting technique was to imitate cows, regurgitating a recent meal and eating it again. Shin tried this a few times, but found it didn’t ease his hunger.

The summertime, when children were sent to the fields to help plant and weed, was peak season for rats and field mice. Shin remembers eating them every day. His happiest, most contented childhood moments were when his belly was full.

The ‘eating problem’, as it’s often called in North Korea, is not confined to labour camps. It has stunted the bodies of millions across the country. Teenage boys fleeing the North in the past decade are on average five inches shorter and weigh twenty-five pounds less than boys growing up in South Korea.[7]

Mental retardation caused by early childhood malnutrition disqualifies about a quarter of potential military conscripts in North Korea, according to the National Intelligence Council, a research institution that is part of the US intelligence community. Its report said hunger-caused intellectual disabilities among the young were likely to cripple economic growth even if the country opened to the outside world or united with the South.

Since the 1990s, North Korea has been unable to grow, buy or deliver enough food to feed its population. Famine in the mid-1990s killed perhaps a million North Koreans. A similar death rate in the United States would claim about twelve million lives.

The North’s food disaster eased in the late 1990s as the government agreed to receive international food aid. The United States became North Korea’s largest aid donor while remaining its most demonized enemy.

Every year North Korea needs to produce more than five million tons of rice and cereal grain to feed its twenty-three million people. Nearly every year it falls short, usually by about a million tons. With long winters and high mountains, the country lacks arable land, denies incentives to farmers and cannot afford fuel or modern farm equipment.

It squeaked by for years without a food catastrophe thanks to subsidies from Moscow, but when the Soviet Union collapsed, the subsidies ended and North Korea’s centrally planned economy stopped functioning. There was no free fuel for its aging factories, no guaranteed market for its often-shoddy goods and no access to cheap, Soviet-made chemical fertilizers on which state farms had become dependent.

For several years, South Korea helped fill the gap, giving Pyongyang half a million tons of fertilizer annually as part of its ‘Sunshine Policy’ to try to ease North–South tensions.

When new leadership in Seoul cut off the free fertilizer in 2008, North Korea tried to do nationally what it has been doing for decades in its labour camps. The masses were told to make toibee, a fertilizer in which ash is mixed with human excrement. In recent winters, frozen human waste has been chipped out of public toilets in cities and towns across the country. Factories, public enterprises and neighbourhoods have been ordered to produce two tons of toibee, according to Good Friends, a Buddhist charity with informants in North Korea. In the spring, it was dried in the open air before being transported to state farms. But organic fertilizers have not come close to replacing the chemicals that state farms depended on for decades.

Sealed away behind an electrified fence during the 1990s, Shin was unaware that millions of his countrymen were desperately hungry.

Neither he nor his parents (as far as Shin knew) had heard that the government was struggling to feed the army or that people were dying of starvation in their apartments in North Korean cities, including the capital.

They did not know that tens of thousands of North Koreans had abandoned their homes and were walking into China in search of food. Nor were they beneficiaries of the billions of dollars’ worth of food aid that poured into North Korea. During those chaotic years, as the basic functioning of Kim Jong Il’s government stalled, think-tank experts in the West were writing books with doomsday titles such as The End of North Korea.

The end was nowhere in sight inside Camp 14, which was self-sufficient except for occasional trainloads of salt.

Prisoners grew their own corn and cabbage. As slave workers, they produced low-cost vegetables, fruit, farmed fish, pork, uniforms, cement, pottery and glassware for the crumbling economy outside the fence.

Shin and his mother were miserable and hungry during the famine, but no more than they were accustomed to. The boy carried on as before, hunting rats, filching his mother’s food and enduring her beatings.

2

The teacher sprang a surprise search. He rifled through Shin’s pockets and those of the forty other six-year-olds in his class.

When it was over, the teacher held five kernels of corn. They all belonged to a girl who was short, slight and, as Shin remembers, exceptionally pretty. He doesn’t recall the girl’s name, but everything else about that school day in June 1989 stands out in his memory.

The teacher was in a bad mood as he began searching pockets, and when he found corn he erupted.

‘You bitch, you stole corn? You want your hands cut off?’

He ordered the girl to the front of the class and told her to kneel. Swinging his long wooden pointer, he struck her on the head again and again. As Shin and his classmates watched in silence, lumps puffed up on her skull, blood leaked from her nose and she toppled over onto the concrete floor. Shin and several other classmates picked her up and carried her home to a pig farm not far from the school. Later that night, she died. Subsection three of Camp 14’s third rule said, ‘Anyone who steals or conceals any foodstuffs will be shot immediately.’

Shin had learned that teachers usually did not take this rule seriously. If they found food in a student’s pocket, they would sometimes deliver a couple of desultory whacks with a stick. More often they would do nothing. It was common for Shin and other students to take a chance. The pretty little girl was just unlucky, as Shin saw it.

He had been trained by guards and teachers to believe that every time he was beaten, he deserved it — because of the treasonous blood he had inherited from his parents. The girl was no different. Shin thought her punishment was just and fair, and he never became angry with his teacher for killing her. He believed his classmates felt the same way.

At school the next day, no mention was made of the beating. Nothing changed in the classroom. As far as Shin was aware, the teacher was not disciplined for his actions.

Shin spent all five years of primary school in class with this same teacher, who was in his early thirties, wore a uniform and carried a pistol in a holster on his hip. In breaks between classes, he allowed students to play ‘rock, paper, scissors’. On Saturdays, he would sometimes grant children an hour or two to pick lice out of each other’s hair. Shin never learned his name.

In grade school Shin was taught to stand up straight, bow to his teachers and never look them in the eye. At the start of school, he was given a black uniform: pants, shirt, an undershirt and a pair of shoes. They were replaced every two years, although they began to fall apart within a month or two.

Soap was sometimes distributed to students as a special reward for hard work. Shin did not distinguish himself with diligence and rarely touched soap. His pants were cardboard stiff from dirt and sweat. If he scraped his skin with a fingernail, grime flaked off. When it was too cold to bathe in the river or stand outside in the rain, Shin, his mother and classmates smelled like farm animals. Nearly everyone’s kneecaps turned black in winter from the dirt. Shin’s mother sewed him underwear and socks out of rags. After her death, he wore no underwear and struggled to find rags to wear inside his shoes.

School — a cluster of buildings readily viewed on satellite photographs — was about a seven-minute walk from Shin’s house. The windows were made of glass, not vinyl. That was the only frill. Like his mother’s house, Shin’s classroom was made of concrete. The teacher stood at a podium in front of a single blackboard. Boys and girls sat separately on either side of a centre aisle. Portraits of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il — the centrepieces of every classroom in North Korea — were nowhere to be found.

Instead, the school taught rudimentary literacy and numeracy, drilled children in camp rules and constantly reminded them of their iniquitous blood. Primary school students attended class six days a week. Secondary students attended seven days, with one day off a month.

‘You have to wash away the sins of your mothers and fathers, so work hard!’ the headmaster told them at assemblies.

The school day began promptly at eight with a session called chonghwa. It means total harmony, but it was an occasion for the teacher to criticize students for what they had done wrong the previous day. Attendance was checked twice daily. No matter how sick a student might be, absences were not allowed. Shin occasionally helped his classmates carry an ailing student to school. But he was rarely sick, other than with colds. He was inoculated just once, for smallpox.

Shin learned how to read and write the Korean alphabet, doing exercises on coarse paper made in the camp from corn husks. Each term, he was given one notebook with twenty-five pages. For a pencil, he often used a sharpened shaft of charred wood. He did not know of the existence of erasers. There were no reading exercises, as the teacher had the only book. For writing exercises, students were instructed to explain how they had failed to work hard and follow rules.

Shin learned to add and subtract, but not to multiply and divide. To this day, when he needs to multiply, he adds a column of numbers.

Physical education meant running around outside and playing on iron bars in the schoolyard. Sometimes students would go down to the river and gather snails for their teacher. There were no ball games. Shin saw a soccer ball for the first time when he was twenty-three, after fleeing to China.

The school’s long-term goals for students were implicit in what the teachers didn’t bother to teach. They told Shin that North Korea was an independent state and noted the existence of cars and trains. (This wasn’t much of a revelation, since Shin had seen guards drive cars and there was a train station in the southwest corner of the camp.) But teachers said nothing about North Korea’s geography, its neighbours, its history or its leaders. Shin had only a vague notion of who the Great Leader and the Dear Leader were.

Questions were not allowed in school. They angered teachers and triggered beatings. Teachers talked; students listened. By repetition in class, Shin mastered the alphabet and basic grammar. He learned how to pronounce words, but frequently had no idea what they meant. His teacher made him afraid, on an instinctive level, of trying to seek out new information.

Shin never came into contact with a classmate who had been born outside the camp. As far as he could tell, the school was reserved for children like him: the camp-bred spawn of reward marriages. He was told that children born elsewhere and brought into the camp with their parents were denied schooling and confined to the camp’s most remote sections, Valleys 4 and 5.

His teachers, as a result, could shape the minds and values of their students without contradiction from children who might know something of what existed beyond the fence.

There was no secret about what was in store for Shin and his classmates. Primary and secondary school trained them for hard labour. In the winter, children cleared snow, chopped down trees and shovelled coal for heating the school. The entire student body (about a thousand students) was mobilized to clean privies in the Bowiwon village where the guards lived, some of them with their wives and children. Shin and his classmates went from house to house chipping out frozen faeces with hoes and dumping the waste with their bare hands (there were no gloves for camp prisoners) on A-frame racks. They then dragged the excrement to the surrounding fields or carried it on their backs.

On warmer, happier days, after school ended in the afternoon, Shin’s class would sometimes march into the hills and mountains behind the school to collect food and herbs for their guards. Although it was against the rules, they often stuffed bracken, osmunda and other ferns inside their uniforms and brought them home to their mothers to make side dishes. They picked agaric mushrooms in April and pine mushrooms in October. On these long afternoon walks the children were allowed to talk to each other. Strict segregation between the sexes was relaxed as boys and girls worked, giggled and played alongside one another.

Shin began first grade with two other children from his village — a boy called Hong Sung Jo and a girl called Moon Sung Sim. They walked to school together for five years and sat in the same classroom. Then in secondary school, they spent another five years in each other’s company.

Shin viewed Hong Sung Jo as his closest companion. They played jacks between classes at school and their mothers worked at the same farm. Neither boy, though, ever invited the other to his house to play. Trust among friends was poisoned by constant competition for food and the pressure to snitch. Trying to win extra food rations, children told teachers and guards what their neighbours were eating, wearing and saying.

Collective punishment at school also turned classmates against each other. Shin’s class was often given a daily quota of trees to plant or acorns to gather. If they failed to meet expectations, everyone in the class was penalized. Teachers would order Shin’s class to give up its lunch ration (for a day or sometimes a week) to another class that had filled its quota. In work details, Shin was usually slow, often last.

As Shin and his classmates grew older, their work details, called ‘rallies of endeavour’, grew longer and more difficult. During ‘weeding combat’, which occurred between June and August, primary school students worked from four in the morning until dusk pulling weeds in corn, bean and sorghum fields.

When Shin and his classmates entered secondary school, they were barely literate. But by then classroom instruction had come to an end. Teachers became foremen. Secondary school was a staging ground for work details in mines, fields and forests. At the end of the day, it was a gathering place for long sessions of self-criticism.

Shin entered his first coal mine at the age of ten. He and five of his classmates (three boys and three girls, including his neighbour Moon Sung Sim) walked down a steep shaft to the face of the mine. Their job was to load coal into two-ton ore cars and push them uphill on a narrow rail track to a staging area. To meet their daily quota, they had to get four cars up the hill.

The first two took all morning. After a lunch of milled corn and salted cabbage, the exhausted children, their faces and clothes covered in coal dust, headed back to the coalface, carrying candles in the ink-black mine.

One day, pushing the third car, Moon Sung Sim lost her balance and one of her feet slipped beneath a steel wheel. Shin, who was standing next to her, heard a scream. He tried to help the writhing, sweating girl remove her shoe. Her big toe was crushed and oozing blood. Another student tied a shoelace around her ankle as a kind of tourniquet.

Shin and two other boys lifted Moon into an empty coal car and pushed it to the top of the mine. Then they carried her to the camp hospital, where her mangled toe was amputated without anaesthetic and treated with salt water.

In addition to harder physical work, secondary school students spent more time finding fault with themselves and each other. They wrote in their cornhusk notebooks, preparing for the nightly self-censure sessions that took place after the evening meal. About ten students a night had to admit to something.

Shin tried to meet with his classmates before these sessions to sort out who would confess to what. They invented sins that would satisfy teachers without provoking draconian punishment. Shin remembers confessing to eating corn he found on the ground and to taking a catnap when no one was looking. If students volunteered enough transgressions, punishments were usually a smack on the head and a warning to work harder.

Wedged closely together, twenty-five boys slept on the concrete floor in the secondary school dormitory. The strongest boys slept near — but not too near — a coal-heated flue that ran under the floor. Weaker boys, including Shin, slept farther away and often shivered through the night. Some had no choice but to try to sleep on top of the flue, where they risked severe burns when the heating system flared up.

Shin remembers a stoutly built, prideful twelve-year-old named Ryu Hak Chul. He slept wherever he chose and was the only boy who dared sass a teacher.

Ryu ditched his work assignment one day, and his disappearance was quickly reported. His teacher sent Shin’s class to find the missing boy.

‘Why’d you stop working and run away?’ the teacher asked when Ryu had been found and marched back to school.

To Shin’s astonishment, Ryu did not apologize.

‘I got hungry, so I went to eat,’ he said flatly.

The teacher, too, was astonished.

‘Is this son of a bitch talking back?’ the teacher asked.

He ordered the students to tie Ryu to a tree. They took off his shirt and bound him with wire.

‘Beat him until he comes to his senses,’ the teacher said.

Without a thought, Shin joined his classmates in thrashing Ryu.

3

Shin was nine years old when the North Korean caste system knocked him on the head.

It was early spring and he and about thirty of his classmates were walking towards the train station, where their teacher had sent them to pick up coal that had spilled from railroad cars during loading. The station is near the south-western corner of Camp 14, and to get there from school the students had to pass below the Bowiwon compound, which sits on a bluff above the Taedong River. The guards’ children live in the compound and attend school there.

From up above, the guards’ children shouted at Shin and his classmates as they walked by.

‘Reactionary sons of bitches are coming.’

Rocks the size of fists rained down on the prison children. With the river below and the bluff above, they had no place to hide. A rock hit Shin in the face, just below his left eye, opening up a deep cut. Shin and his classmates shrieked and cowered on the dirt road, trying to protect their heads with their arms and hands.

A second rock struck Shin on the head, knocking him to the ground and making him dizzy. When his head cleared, the stoning had stopped. Many of his classmates were moaning and bleeding. Moon, his neighbour and classmate who later lost her big toe in the mine, had been knocked out. The leader of Shin’s class, Hong Joo Hyun, who was supposed to be a kind of foreman for the day’s work mission, was also out cold.

Earlier that morning at school, their teacher had told them to hurry ahead to the train station and start work. He said he would catch up later.

When the teacher finally walked down the road and discovered his bloodied students sprawled in the road, he became angry.

‘What are you doing not getting yourselves to work?’ he shouted.

The students timidly asked what they should do with their classmates who were still unconscious.

‘Put them on your backs and carry them,’ the teacher instructed. ‘All you need to do is work hard.’

In the years ahead, when Shin spotted Bowiwon children anywhere in the camp, he walked in the opposite direction if he could.

Bowiwon children had every reason to throw stones at the likes of Shin. His blood, as the offspring of irredeemable sinners, was tainted in the worst conceivable way. Bowiwon children, however, came from families whose lineage had been sanctified by the Great Leader.

To identify and isolate his perceived political enemies, Kim Il Sung created a neofeudal, blood-based pecking order in 1957. The government classified and, to a considerable extent, segregated the entire North Korean population based on the perceived reliability of an individual’s parents and grandparents. North Korea called itself the Worker’s Paradise, but even as it professed allegiance to communist ideals of equality, it invented one of the world’s most rigidly stratified caste systems.

Three broad classes were created with fifty-one subgroups: at the top, members of the core class could obtain jobs in government, the Korean Workers’ Party, officer ranks in the military and the intelligence services. The core class included farm workers, families of soldiers killed during the Korean War, families of troops who had served with Kim Il Sung fighting against Japanese occupation and government workers.

The next level was the wavering or neutral class, which included soldiers, technicians and teachers. At the bottom was the hostile class, whose members were suspected of opposing the government. They included former property owners, relatives of Koreans who had fled to South Korea, Christians and those who worked for the Japanese colonial government that controlled the Korean Peninsula before World War II. Their descendants now work in mines and factories. They are not allowed into universities.

Besides dictating career opportunities, the system shaped geographic destiny, with the core class allowed to live in and around Pyongyang. Many members of the hostile class were resettled to distant provinces along the Chinese border. Some members of the wavering class could move up in the system by joining the Korean People’s Army, serving with distinction and, with luck and connections, securing a lower rung in the ruling party.

Rapid growth of private markets made some traders from the wavering and hostile classes wealthy, allowing them to buy and bribe their way into better living standards than some of the political elite.[8]

For government positions, though, family background decided nearly everything, including who had the right to throw stones at Shin.

The only North Koreans considered trustworthy enough to become guards in political prison camps were men like An Myeong Chul, the son of a North Korean intelligence officer.

He was recruited into the Bowibu at nineteen, after two years of military service. As part of the process, the loyalty of his entire extended family was checked. He was also required to sign a document saying he would never disclose the existence of the camps. Sixty per cent of the two hundred young men who were recruited with him as guards were also the sons of intelligence officers.

An worked as a guard and driver in four labour camps (not including Camp 14) for seven years in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He fled to China in 1994 after his father, who supervised regional food distribution, ran afoul of his superiors and committed suicide. After finding his way to South Korea, An found work as a banker in Seoul and married a South Korean woman. They have two children. He also became a human rights activist.

After his defection he learned that his sister and brother were sent to a labour camp, where his brother later died.

When we spoke at a Chinese dinner in Seoul in 2009, An wore a dark blue suit, white shirt, striped tie and half-frame glasses. He looked prosperous and spoke in a quiet, careful way.

When he was training to be a guard, he studied the Korean martial art of tae kwon do, learned riot-suppression techniques and was instructed not to worry if his treatment of prisoners caused injury or death. In the camps, he became accustomed to hitting prisoners who did not meet work quotas. He remembers beating up a hunchbacked prisoner.

‘It was normal to beat prisoners,’ he said, explaining that his instructors taught him never to smile and to think of inmates as ‘dogs and pigs’.

‘We were taught not to think of them as human beings,’ he said. ‘The instructors told us not to show pity. They said, “If you do, you will become a prisoner.”’

Although pity was forbidden, there were few other guidelines for treatment of prisoners. As a result, An said, guards were free to indulge their appetites and eccentricities, often preying on attractive young female prisoners who would usually consent to sex in exchange for better treatment.

‘If this resulted in babies, women and their babies were killed,’ An said, noting that he had personally seen newborns clubbed to death with iron rods. ‘The theory behind the camps was to cleanse unto three generations the families of incorrect thinkers. So it was inconsistent to allow another generation to be born.’

Guards could win admission to college if they caught an inmate trying to escape — an incentive system that ambitious guards seized upon. Sometimes they would enable prisoners to make an escape attempt, An said, and shoot them before they reached the fences that surround the camps.

Most often, though, prisoners were beaten, sometimes to death, simply because guards were bored or in a sour mood.

Although prison guards and their legitimate children belong by blood to the core class, they are fringe functionaries locked away for most of their working lives in the freezing hinterlands.

The core of the core live in Pyongyang in large apartments or single-family homes located in gated neighbourhoods. Outsiders do not know with any certainty how many of these elite there are in North Korea, but South Korean and American scholars believe they are a tiny fraction of the country’s population, numbering between one and two hundred thousand out of twenty-three million.

Trusted and talented members of the elite are periodically allowed outside the country, where they serve as diplomats and traders for state-owned companies. In the past decade, the United States government and law enforcement agencies around the world have documented that some of these North Koreans are involved in criminal enterprises that funnel hard currency to Pyongyang.

They have been linked to counterfeiting hundred-dollar bills, cyberterrorism, trafficking drugs ranging from heroin to Viagra, and marketing high-quality brand-name (but counterfeit) cigarettes. According to UN officials, and in violation of United Nations resolutions, North Koreans have also sold rockets and nuclear weapons technology to countries including Iran and Syria.

One well-travelled member of the North Korean elite told me how he earned his keep while securing the support and affections of Kim Jong Il. His name is Kim Kwang Jin and he grew up in Pyongyang as a member of the blue-blood elite. He studied British literature at Kim Il Sung University, which is reserved for children of top officials. His professional expertise, before defecting to South Korea in 2003, was managing a state-run global insurance fraud. It collected hundreds of millions of dollars from some of the world’s largest insurance companies on falsified claims for industrial accidents and natural disasters inside North Korea, and it funnelled most of the money to the Dear Leader.

The festive annual highlight of this scheme took place in the week before Kim Jong Il’s birthday on 16 February. Foreign-based executives of the Korean National Insurance Corporation, the state monopoly that orchestrated the fraud, prepared a special birthday gift.

From his office in Singapore, Kim Kwang Jin watched in early February 2003 as his colleagues stuffed twenty million dollars in cash into two heavy-duty bags and sent them, via Beijing, to Pyongyang. This was money that had been paid by international insurance companies, and it was not a one-time offering. Kim said that in the five years he was based in Pyongyang for the state insurance corporation, bags of cash always arrived in time for his leader’s birthday. He said they came from Switzerland, France and Austria, as well as from Singapore.

The money, he said, was delivered to Office 39 of the Korean Workers’ Party Central Committee. This infamous office or bureau was created by Kim Jong Il in the 1970s to collect hard currency and to give him a power base independent of his father, who was then still running the country. According to Kim (and scores of other defectors and published accounts), Office 39 buys luxury goods to secure the loyalty of the North Korean elite. It also funds the purchase of foreign-made components for missiles and other weapons programmes.

As Kim explained it to me, his country’s insurance scam worked like this: Pyongyang-based managers for the state insurance monopoly would write policies that covered costly but common North Korean disasters such as mining accidents, train crashes and crop losses resulting from floods. ‘The major point of the reinsurance operation is that they are banking on disaster,’ he said. ‘Whenever there is a disaster, it becomes a source of hard currency’ for the government.

Kim and other foreign-based operatives of the North Korean insurance company were dispatched around the globe to find insurance brokers who would accept seductively high insurance premiums to compensate North Korea for the cost of these disasters.

Reinsurance is a multibillion-dollar industry that spreads the risk assumed by one insurance company to a number of companies around the world. Each year, Kim said, North Korea would do its best to shuffle its offerings among the major reinsurance players.

‘We pass it around,’ he told me. ‘One year it might be Lloyd’s [of London]. The next year it might be Swiss Re.’

By spreading relatively moderate losses among many big companies, North Korea concealed how bad a risk it was. Its government prepared meticulously documented claims, rushed them through its puppet court, and demanded immediate payment. But it often restricted the ability of reinsurers to dispatch investigators to verify claims. According to a London-based expert on the insurance industry, North Korea also exploited the geographical ignorance and political naïveté of some reinsurers and their brokers. Many of them thought they were dealing with a firm from South Korea, the expert said, while others were unaware that North Korea is a closed totalitarian state with sham courts and no international accountability.

Over time, reinsurance companies got wise to frequent and costly claims for train crashes and ferry sinkings that were all but impossible to investigate. Lawyers for German insurance giant Allianz Global Investors, Lloyd’s of London and several other reinsurers filed a suit in a London court against the Korean National Insurance Corporation. They contested its claim for a 2005 helicopter crash into a government-owned warehouse in Pyongyang. In court documents, the companies alleged that the crash was staged, that the North Korean court’s decision to uphold the claim had been rigged and that North Korea routinely used insurance fraud to raise money for the personal use of Kim Jong Il.

The reinsurance companies, however, dropped their claims and agreed to a settlement that was a near-complete victory for North Korea. They did so, legal analysts said, because they had foolishly signed contracts in which they agreed to be bound by North Korean law. After the settlement, North Korea’s lawyers said it was ‘staggeringly unfair’ to suggest that the country engaged in insurance fraud. But publicity generated by the case alerted the world’s reinsurance industry to avoid North Korea, and so the fraud wound down.

When Kim Kwang Jin helped send the twenty-million-dollar bags of cash from Singapore to Pyongyang, he said that Kim Jong Il was delighted.

‘We received a letter of thanks and it was a great celebration,’ he said, noting that Kim Jong Il arranged for him and his colleagues to receive gifts that included oranges, apples, DVD players and blankets.

Fruit, home electronics and blankets.

This meagre display of dictatorial gratitude is telling. In Pyongyang, living standards for the core class are luxurious only by the standards of a country where a third of the population is chronically hungry.

Elites have relatively large apartments and access to rice. They are also granted first dibs on imported luxuries such as fruit and alcohol. But for residents of Pyongyang, electricity is intermittent at best, hot water is rarely available and travel outside the country is difficult except for diplomats and state-sponsored businessmen.

‘An elite family in Pyongyang does not live nearly as well — in terms of material possessions, creature comforts and entertainment options — as the family of an average salary man in Seoul,’ Andrei Lankov, a Russian-born political scientist who attended college in Pyongyang and now teaches at Kookmin University in Seoul, told me. Average per capita income in South Korea is fifteen times as high as in the North ($1,900 in 2009). Countries with higher per capita incomes than North Korea include Sudan, Congo and Laos.

The exception, of course, is the Kim family dynasty. Satellite images of the family’s residences stand out like sable-clad thumbs in the mangy landscape of North Korea. The family maintains at least eight country houses, according to books by his former chef and a former bodyguard. Nearly all of them have cinemas, basketball courts and shooting ranges. Several have indoor swimming pools, along with entertainment centres for bowling and rollerskating. Satellite pictures show a full-size horseracing track, a private train station and a water park.

A private yacht, which has a fifty-metre pool with two waterslides, was photographed near the family’s house in Wonsan, which is located on a peninsula with white sandy beaches and is believed to be a family favourite. The former bodyguard said Kim Jong Il often went there to hunt roe deer, pheasants and wild geese. All his houses have been furnished with imports from Japan and Europe. The family’s beef is raised by bodyguards on a special cattle ranch and their apples come from an organic orchard where sugar, a rare and costly commodity in the North, is added to the soil to sweeten the fruit.[9]

The privileges of blood are uniquely rich in the Kim family. Kim Jong Il inherited his dictatorial control of North Korea from his father in 1994 — the first hereditary succession in the communist world. The second such succession occurred in December 2011, after Kim’s death at age sixty-nine. His youngest son, Kim Jong Eun, was promptly hailed as the ‘supreme leader’ of the party, state and army. Although it was unclear if he, his older relatives, or the generals would wield real power, propagandists worked overtime manufacturing a new cult of personality. Kim Jong Eun was described in the party daily, Rodong Sinmun, as ‘the spiritual pillar and lighthouse of hope’ for the military and the people. The state news agency noted that the new leader is ‘a prominent thinker-theoretician and peerlessly illustrious commander’ who will be a ‘solid foundation for the prosperity of the country.’

Other than having the right blood, the son’s qualifications were meagre. He attended a German-language school in Leibefeld, Switzerland, where he played point guard on the basketball team and spent hours making pencil drawings of Chicago Bulls great Michael Jordan.[10] He returned to Pyongyang at seventeen to attend Kim Il Sung University. Little is known about what he studied there.

Preparations for a second father-to-son transfer of power became apparent in Pyongyang shortly after Kim Jong Il suffered a stroke in 2008. It left the Dear Leader with a noticeable limp and signalled the emergence of Kim Jong Eun from obscurity.

In lectures delivered to select audiences in Pyongyang in 2009, Kim Jong Eun was described as a ‘genius of the literary arts’ and a patriot who ‘is working without sleep or rest’ to promote North Korea as a nuclear superpower. A propaganda song, ‘Footsteps’, was circulated at military bases to prepare the cadre for the coming of a dynamic ‘Young General’. He was indeed young, in his late twenties, born in either 1983 or 1984.

At his coming-out party in September 2010, the Young General’s face was officially shown to the world for the first time. Astonished Western journalists who are normally denied access to North Korea were summoned to a grand military parade in Kim Il Sung Square, where they were encouraged to film and photograph a young man who looked as fresh as his father looked debilitated. He was the spitting image of his late grandfather Kim Il Sung, who was always more beloved than Kim Jong Il.

That uncanny resemblance, as Kim Jong Eun moved to consolidate power after the death of his father, seemed orchestrated. His clothes and haircut — Mao suits and a short military trim with no sideburns — were the same as his grandfather’s when he seized control of North Korea in 1945. Rumours circulated in South Korea that the resemblance had been enhanced by plastic surgeons in Pyongyang to render the young man as a kind of Great Leader II.

If the new leader is to secure the same steely grip on the country as his father and grandfather, he certainly needs some measure of public support, along with solid backing from the military. His father, Kim Jong Il, may never have been popular, but he had nearly twenty years to learn how to dominate his elders. He had handpicked many of the leading generals and was effectively running the country when his father died in 1994.

Not yet thirty years old, with less than three years to learn the levers, Kim Jong Eun has no such advantage. Until he figures it out, he will have to depend on his privileged blood, a budding cult of personality, and the loyalty of relatives, courtiers and generals who may or may not be content to stand in the shadows.

4

Shin was putting on his shoes in the school dormitory when his teacher came looking for him. It was Saturday morning, 6 April 1996.

‘Hey, Shin, come out as you are,’ the teacher said.

Puzzled as to why he had been summoned, Shin hurried out of the dormitory and into the schoolyard. There, three uniformed men were waiting for him beside a jeep. They handcuffed him, blindfolded him with a strip of black cloth and pushed him into the backseat of the jeep. Without saying a word, they drove him away.

Shin had no idea where he was being taken or why, but after half an hour of bouncing along in the backseat, he became afraid and started to tremble.

When the jeep stopped, the men lifted Shin out and stood him on his feet. He heard the clunk of a heavy metal door opening and closing, then the whine of machinery. Guards nudged him into an elevator, and he felt himself descending. He had entered an underground prison inside the camp.

After stepping out of the elevator, he was led down a corridor and into a large, bare, windowless room where guards removed his blindfold. Opening his eyes, he saw a military officer with four stars pinned to his uniform. The officer sat behind a desk. Two other guards in khaki stood nearby. One of them ordered Shin to sit down in a straight-backed chair.

‘You’re Shin In Geun?’ the officer with four stars asked.

‘Yes, that is correct,’ Shin replied.

‘Shin Gyung Sub is the name of your father?’

‘Yes.’

‘Jang Hye Gyung is your mother’s name?’

‘Yes.’

‘Shin He Geun is the name of your brother?’

‘Yes.’

The officer stared at Shin for about five minutes. Shin could not figure out where the interrogation was headed.

‘Do you know why you’re here?’ the officer asked at last.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Shall I tell you then?’

Shin nodded yes.

‘At dawn today, your mother and your brother were caught trying to escape. That’s why you’re here. Understand? Were you aware of this fact or not?’

‘I … I didn’t know.’

Shin was so shocked by the news that he found it difficult to speak. He wasn’t sure if he was awake or dreaming. The officer became increasingly angry and incredulous.

‘How is it possible for you not to know that your mother and brother tried to run away?’ he asked. ‘If you want to live, you should spit out the truth.’

‘No, I really didn’t know,’ Shin said.

‘And your father didn’t mention anything?’

‘It’s been a while since I was last home,’ Shin replied. ‘When I visited a month ago, I heard nothing.’

‘What kind of grievance does your family have to risk an escape?’ the officer asked.

‘I honestly don’t know anything.’

This was the story that Shin told when he arrived in South Korea in the late summer of 2006. He told it consistently, he told it often and he told it well.

His debriefings in Seoul began with agents from the government’s National Intelligence Service (NIS). Experienced interrogators, they conduct extensive interviews with every North Korean defector and have been trained to screen out the assassins that Kim Jong Il’s government periodically dispatched to the South.

After the NIS, Shin told his story to counsellors and psychiatrists at a government centre for resettlement, then to human rights activists and fellow defectors, and then to the local and international news media. He wrote about it in his 2007 Korean-language memoir, and he told it to me when we first met in December 2008. He elaborated on it nine months later during a week of day-long interviews with me in Seoul.

There was, of course, no way to confirm what he was saying. Shin was the only available source of information about his early life. His mother and brother were dead. His father was still in the camp or perhaps dead too. The North Korean government could hardly set the record straight, since it denies that Camp 14 exists.

On a cloudless morning in Torrance, California, Shin revisited and revised the story.

We’d been working on the book on and off for about a year, and for the past week we had been sitting across from each other in my dimly lit room in a Best Western hotel, slowly sifting through the events of his early life.

A day before this session, Shin said he had something new and important to disclose. He insisted that we find a new translator. He also invited Hannah Song, his then boss and de facto guardian, to listen in. Song was the executive director of Liberty in North Korea, the human rights group that had helped bring Shin to the United States. A twenty-nine-year-old Korean American, she helped Shin manage his money, visas, travel, medical care and behaviour. She jokingly described herself as Shin’s mum.

Shin took off his sandals and tucked his bare feet underneath him on the hotel sofa. I turned on a tape recorder. The sound of morning traffic filtered into the room from Torrance Boulevard. Shin fidgeted with the buttons on his mobile phone.

‘So what’s up?’ I asked.

Shin said he had been lying about his mother’s escape. He invented the lie just before arriving in South Korea.

‘There were a lot of things I needed to hide,’ he said. ‘I was terrified of a backlash, of people asking me, “Are you even human?”’

‘It has been a burden to keep this inside. In the beginning, I didn’t think much of my lie. It was my intent to lie. Now the people around me make me want to be honest. They make me want to be more moral. In that sense, I felt like I need to tell the truth. I now have friends who are honest. I have begun to understand what honesty is. I feel extreme guilt for everything.

‘I was more faithful to the guards than to my family. We were each other’s spies. I know by telling the truth, people will look down on me.

‘Outsiders have a wrong understanding of the camp. It is not just the soldiers who beat us. It is the prisoners themselves who are not kind to each other. There is no sense of community. I am one of those mean prisoners.’

Shin said he did not expect forgiveness for what he was about to disclose. He said he had not forgiven himself. He also seemed to be trying to do something more than expiate guilt. He wanted to explain — in a way that he acknowledged would damage his credibility as a witness — how the camp had warped his character.

He said that if outsiders could understand what political prison camps have done, and are doing, to children born inside the fence, it would redeem his lie and his life.

5

This story begins a day earlier, on the afternoon of Friday, 5 April 1996.

As school wound down for the day, Shin’s teacher surprised him. He told Shin that he did not have to spend the night in the dormitory. He could go home and eat supper with his mother.

The teacher was rewarding Shin for good behaviour. After two years in the dormitory, he had begun to figure a few things out. He was less often a laggard, less often beaten, more often a snitch.

Shin did not particularly want to spend the night at his mother’s place. Living apart had not improved their relationship. He still didn’t trust her to take care of him; she still seemed tense in his presence. The teacher, however, told him to go home. So he went.

As unexpected as it had been for him to be sent home, there was a bigger surprise when he got there. His brother, Shin He Geun, had come home too. He worked at the camp’s cement factory, located several miles away in the far southeast of the camp. Shin barely knew and rarely saw Shin He Geun, who had been out of the house for a decade and was now twenty-one.

All that Shin knew about his brother was that he was not a hard worker. He had rarely been granted permission to leave the factory to see his parents. For him to be in his mother’s house, Shin thought, he must have finally done something right.

Shin’s mother was not delighted when her youngest son showed up unexpectedly for supper. She did not say welcome or that she had missed him.

Then she cooked, using her daily ration of seven hundred grams of corn meal to make porridge in the one pot she owned. With bowls and spoons, she and her sons ate on the kitchen floor. After he had eaten, Shin went to sleep in the bedroom.

Some time later, voices from the kitchen woke him up. He peeked through the bedroom door, curious about what his mother and brother were up to.

His mother was cooking rice. For Shin, this was a slap in the face. He had been served a watery corn soup, the same tasteless gruel he had eaten every day of his life. Now his brother was getting rice.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of rice in North Korean culture. It signifies wealth, evokes the closeness of family and sanctifies a proper meal. Labour camp prisoners almost never eat rice and its absence is a daily reminder of the normality they can never have.

Outside the camp, too, chronic shortages have removed rice from the daily diets of many North Koreans, especially those in the hostile classes. Teenage defectors from the North, when they arrive in South Korea, have told government counsellors of a recurring dream: they are sitting at a table with their families, eating warm rice. Among the elite in Pyongyang, one of the most coveted signifiers of status is an electric rice cooker.

As Shin watched his mother cook, he guessed she must have stolen the rice, a few grains at a time, from the farm where she worked and secreted it away in her house.

In the bedroom, Shin fumed.

He also listened.

His brother was doing most of the talking. Shin heard that Shin He Geun had not been given the day off. Without permission, he had walked away from the cement factory, where he had apparently done something wrong.

Shin realized his brother was in trouble and that he would probably be punished when the guards caught up with him. His mother and brother were discussing what they should do.

Escape.

Shin was astonished to hear his brother say the word. He was planning to run. His mother was helping him and her precious hoard of rice was food for the flight.

Shin did not hear his mother say that she intended to go along. But she was not trying to argue her eldest into staying, even though she knew that if he escaped or died trying she and others in her family would be tortured and probably killed. Every prisoner knew the first rule of Camp 14, subsection 2: ‘Any witness to an attempted escape who fails to report it will be shot immediately.’

His mother did not sound alarmed, but Shin was. His heart pounded. He was angry that she would put his life at risk for the sake of his older brother. He was afraid he would be implicated in the escape and shot.

He was also jealous that his brother was getting rice.

On the floor of his mother’s bedroom, as the aggrieved thirteen-year-old struggled to contain his fear, Shin’s camp-bred instincts took over: he had to tell a guard. He got up off the floor, went into the kitchen and headed out the door.

‘Where are you going?’ his mother asked.

‘To the toilet,’ he said.

Shin ran back to his school. It was one in the morning. He entered the school dormitory. His teacher had gone home to the gated Bowiwon village.

Who could he tell?

In the crowded dormitory room where his class slept, Shin found his friend Hong Sung Jo and woke him up.

Shin trusted this boy as much as he trusted anyone.

Shin told him what his mother and brother were planning and asked for advice. Hong told him to tell the school’s night guard. They went together. As they walked to the guard’s office in the main school building, Shin thought of a way to profit from his information.

The guard was awake and in uniform. He told both boys to come inside his office.

‘I need to say something to you,’ Shin told the guard, whom he did not know. ‘But before I do, I want to get something in return.’

The guard assured Shin that he would help.

‘I want a guarantee of more food,’ Shin said.

Shin’s second demand was that he be named grade leader at school, a position that would allow him to work less and not be beaten as often.

The guard guaranteed Shin that his requests would be granted.

Accepting the guard’s word, Shin explained what his brother and mother were planning and where they were. The guard telephoned his superiors. He told Shin and Hong to go back to the dormitory and get some sleep. He would take care of everything.

On the morning after he betrayed his mother and brother, uniformed men did come to the schoolyard for Shin.

Just as he wrote in his memoir, and as he told everyone in South Korea, he was handcuffed, blindfolded, pushed into the backseat of a jeep and driven away in silence to an underground prison inside the camp.

But Shin knew why he had been summoned. And the guards in charge of Camp 14, he expected, knew he had tipped them off.

6

‘Do you know why you are here?’

Shin knew what he had done; he had followed camp rules and stopped an escape.

But the officer did not know, or did not care, that Shin had been a dutiful informer.

‘At dawn today, your mother and your brother were caught trying to escape. That’s why you’re here. Understand? Were you aware of this fact or not? How is it possible for you not to know that your mother and brother tried to run away? If you want to live, you should spit out the truth.’

Confused and increasingly frightened, Shin found it difficult to speak. He was an informant. He could not understand why he was being interrogated as an accomplice.

Shin would eventually figure out that the night guard at the school had claimed all the credit for discovering the escape plan. When reporting to his superiors, he had not mentioned Shin’s role.

But on that morning in the underground prison, Shin understood nothing. He was a bewildered thirteen-year-old. The officer with four stars kept asking him about the whys, whens and hows of his family’s escape plan. Shin was unable to say anything coherent.

Finally, the officer pushed some papers across his desk.

‘In that case, bastard, read this and affix your thumbprint at the bottom.’

The document was a family rap sheet. It listed the names, ages and crimes of Shin’s father and of his father’s eleven brothers.

The eldest brother, Shin Tae Sub, was listed first. Next to his name was a date: 1951, the second year of the Korean War. On the same line, Shin saw his uncle’s crimes: disruption of public peace, acts of brutality and defection to the South. The same offences were listed beside the name of Shin’s second oldest uncle.

It took Shin many months to understand what he had been allowed to see. The papers explained why his father’s family had been locked up in Camp 14.

The unforgivable crime Shin’s father had committed was being the brother of two young men who had fled south during a fratricidal war that razed much of the Korean Peninsula and divided hundreds of thousands of families. Shin’s unforgivable crime was being his father’s son. Shin’s father had never explained any of this.

His father later told Shin about the day in 1965 when the family was taken away by the security forces. Before dawn, they forced their way into a house owned by Shin’s grandfather in Mundok County in South Pyongan Province. It’s a fertile farming area located about thirty-five miles north of the capital, Pyongyang. ‘Pack your things,’ the armed men shouted. They did not explain why the family was being arrested or where they were going. At daybreak, a truck showed up for their belongings. The family travelled for an entire day (a distance of about forty-five miles on mountain roads) before arriving at Camp 14.

As ordered, Shin put his thumbprint on the document.

Guards blindfolded him again, led him out of the interrogation room and marched him down a corridor. When they pulled away the blindfold, Shin read the number seven on a cell door. Guards pushed him inside and tossed him a prison uniform.

‘Hey, son of a bitch, change into this.’

The uniform would have fitted a large adult. When Shin pulled it over his short, bony frame, he disappeared into what felt like a burlap sack.

Shin’s cell was a concrete square, barely large enough for him to lie down. It had a toilet in the corner and a sink with running water. The light bulb hanging from the ceiling was on when Shin entered the cell and it could not be turned off. Without windows, Shin could not distinguish night from day. There were two thin blankets on the floor. He was given nothing to eat and could not sleep.

He believes it was the next day when guards opened the door, blindfolded him and led him to a second interrogation room, where two new officers were waiting. They ordered Shin to kneel and pressed him to explain why his family wanted to escape. What grudges did his mother harbour? What did he discuss with her? What were his brother’s intentions?

Shin said he did not have answers to their questions.

‘You haven’t lived but a few years,’ one of the guards told Shin. ‘Just confess and go out and live. Would you like to die in here?’

‘I … really don’t know anything,’ he replied.

He was increasingly frightened, increasingly hungry and still struggling to understand why the guards did not know he was the one who had tipped them off.

The guards sent him back to his cell.

On what seemed to be the morning of the third day, one of his interrogators and three other guards entered Shin’s cell. They shackled his ankles, tied a rope to a hook in the ceiling and hung him upside down. Then they left and locked the door — all without a word.

His feet almost touched the ceiling. His head was suspended about two feet above the floor. Reaching out with his hands, which the guards had left untied, Shin could not quite touch the floor. He squirmed and swung around, trying to right himself, but could not. His neck cramped and his ankles hurt. Eventually his legs went numb. His head, flushed with blood, ached more with each hour.

The guards did not return until evening. They untied the boy and left, again without a word. Food arrived in his cell, but Shin found it almost impossible to eat. He could not move his fingers, and his ankles were gouged and bleeding from the sharp steel edges of the shackles.

On the fourth day, the interrogators wore civilian clothes, not uniforms.

After being blindfolded and marched from his cell, Shin met them in a dimly lit room with a high ceiling. It had the look of a machine shop.

A chain dangled from a winch on the ceiling. Hooks on the walls held a hammer, axe, pliers and clubs of various shapes and sizes. On a wide shop table, Shin saw a large pair of pincers, a tool used for gripping and carrying pieces of hot metal.

‘How is it, being in this room?’ one of the interrogators asked.

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.

7

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.

8

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.

9

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.

Except for him.

Perhaps because he was a proven snitch, camp authorities sent him back to school. But his return wasn’t easy.

Trouble started as soon as Shin walked from the execution grounds to his school, where he had a private meeting with his teacher. Shin had known this man for two years (although he never learned his name) and regarded him as relatively fair-minded, at least by camp standards.

At the meeting, though, the teacher was seething. He wanted to know why Shin had tipped off the school’s night guard about the escape plot.

‘Why didn’t you come to me first?’ he shouted.

‘I wanted to, but I couldn’t find you,’ Shin replied, explaining that it was late at night and the teachers’ compound was off-limits to prisoners.

‘You could have waited until the morning,’ the teacher said.

The teacher had not received any credit from his superiors for uncovering the escape plot, and he blamed this miscarriage of justice on Shin, warning the boy that he would pay for his thoughtlessness. When Shin’s class — about thirty-five students — assembled later in the classroom, the teacher pointed at Shin and shouted, ‘Come up front. Kneel!’

Shin knelt on the concrete floor for nearly six hours. When he wiggled to ease his discomfort, the teacher whacked him with a blackboard pointer.

On his second day back at school, Shin walked with his class to a camp farm to gather corn straw and haul it to a threshing floor. Shin pulled an A-frame carrier loaded with straw. It was relatively light work compared to pushing coal carts, but it required that he wear a kind of harness with a leather strap that chafed the tender scars on his lower back and tailbone.

Soon, blood was oozing down his legs, soaking the pants of his school uniform.

Shin dared not complain. His teacher had warned him that he would need to work harder than his classmates to wash away the sins of his mother and brother.

At school and during field work, all students had to ask permission to urinate or defecate. When Shin made his first bathroom request after his release from prison, his teacher said no. Shin tried to hold it during the school day, but ended up peeing his pants a couple of times a week, usually when he and other students were working outside. Since it was winter and very cold, he worked in pants stiff with urine.

Shin had known most of his classmates since they were seven years old and started primary school together. He was smaller than most of the boys in his class, but they had usually treated him as a peer. Now, taking their cue from the teacher, they began to taunt and bully him.

They snatched away his food, punched him in the stomach and called him names. Almost all the names were elaborations on ‘reactionary son of a bitch’.

Shin is not certain if his classmates knew he had betrayed his mother and brother. He believes that his childhood friend, Hong, did not tell anyone. In any case, Shin was never teased for having betrayed his family. That would have been an unpatriotic and risky schoolyard taunt, since all students were under orders from teachers and guards to inform on their families and on each other.

Before his time in prison, Shin had managed to make a strategic classroom alliance. He had become friends with Hong Joo Hyun, the grade leader. (This was the job Shin had tried to win on the night he snitched on his family.) Hong led students on work details and was authorized by the teacher to hit and kick classmates he regarded as shirkers. He was also the teacher’s most trusted informer.

Hong himself could be beaten or denied meals if the class dithered during field work and failed to meet quotas. His position was similar to adult prisoners known as jagubbanjang, or crew managers. Guards gave these managers, who were always male and tended to be physically imposing, virtually unchecked authority over their fellow prisoners. Since the managers had to answer for any failures by their crews, they were often more vigilant, brutal and unforgiving than camp guards.

After Shin’s mother and brother were executed, Hong began to watch Shin carefully. During a road repair assignment, he noticed that Shin had loaded far too many stones in a handcart. Shin tried again and again to push the cart, but it was too heavy for the emaciated boy to budge.

When Shin saw his grade leader approaching with a shovel, he initially expected some help. He thought that Hong would order other students to pitch in and roll the cart. Instead, Hong swung his shovel and struck Shin in the back, knocking him to the ground.

‘Pull your handcart correctly,’ Hong said.

He kicked Shin in the side of the head and told him to stand up. As Shin struggled to get to his feet, Hong again swung his shovel and mashed Shin’s nose, which began to bleed.

After that beating, students who were younger and smaller than Shin began to insult his mother. With the encouragement of the teacher, they called him names and punched him.

Owing to his confinement in the underground cell, Shin had lost much of his strength and nearly all of his endurance. His return to hard labour, long hours and skimpy meals at school made him almost insanely hungry.

In the school cafeteria, he scrounged constantly for spilled cabbage soup, dipping his hand in cold dirty soup that had spilled on the floor and licking his fingers clean. He searched floors, roads and fields for grains of rice, beans, or cow dung that contained undigested kernels of corn.

On a morning work detail in December, a couple of weeks after his return to school, Shin discovered a dried-up ear of corn in a pile of straw and devoured it. Hong Joo Hyun was nearby. He ran over to Shin, grabbed him by the hair, and dragged him to their nearby teacher.

‘Teacher, instead of working, Shin is just scavenging for food.’

As Shin fell to his knees to beg for forgiveness (a ritual abasement that he performed as a matter of instinct), his teacher hit him on the head with his walking stick and shouted for the rest of the class to help punish the scavenger.

‘Come here and slap him,’ the teacher said.

Shin knew what was coming. He had slapped and punched many of his classmates in a round-robin of collective punishment. Students queued up in front of Shin. Girls slapped him on the right cheek, boys on the left. Shin believes they went through five rotations before the teacher said it was time for lunch.

Before his confinement in the secret prison and before his teacher and schoolmates began picking on him, Shin hadn’t thought to blame anyone for his birth inside Camp 14.

His blinkered existence kept him focused on finding food and avoiding beatings. He was indifferent to the outside world, to his parents and to the history of his family. As much as he believed in anything, he believed the guards’ preaching about original sin. As the offspring of traitors, his one chance at redemption — and his only way of averting starvation — was hard work.

Back at school, however, he bristled with resentment. He was not yet hobbled by guilt about his mother and brother — that would come much later — but his months in the cell with Uncle had lifted, if only slightly, a curtain on the world beyond the fence.

Shin had become conscious of what he could never eat or see. The filth, stink and bleakness of the camp crushed his spirit. As he became marginally self-aware, he discovered loneliness, regret and longing.

Most of all, he was angry with both his parents. His mother’s scheming, he believed, had triggered his torture. He blamed her, too, for the abuse and humiliation dished out by his teacher and classmates. He despised both his mother and father for selfishly breeding in a labour camp, for producing offspring doomed to die behind barbed wire.

Out on the execution grounds, in the moments after Shin’s mother and brother were killed, Shin’s father had tried to comfort the boy.

‘You OK? Are you hurt anywhere? Did you see your mother in there?’ his father asked repeatedly, referring to the underground prison.

Shin was too angry to reply.

After the execution, he even found it distasteful to say the word ‘father’. On his rare days off from school — about fourteen days a year — Shin was expected to go and see his father. During the visits, Shin would often refuse to speak.

His father tried to apologize.

‘I know you’re suffering because you have the wrong parents,’ he told Shin. ‘You were unlucky to be born to us. What can you do? Things just turned out this way.’

Suicide is a powerful temptation for North Koreans plucked out of ordinary lives and subjected to the labour camps’ regime of hard labour, hunger, beatings and sleep deprivation.

‘Suicide was not uncommon in the camp,’ Kang Cholhwan wrote in his memoir about the decade he spent inside Camp 15. ‘A number of our neighbours took that road … They usually left behind letters criticizing the regime, or at the very least its Security Force … Truth be told, some form of punishment would await the family regardless of whether or not a critical note were left behind. It was a rule that admitted no exceptions. The Party saw suicide as an attempt to escape its grasp, and if the individual who had tried the trick wasn’t around to pay for it, someone else needed to be found.’[11]

North Korea’s National Security Agency warns all prisoners that suicide will be punished with longer sentences for surviving relatives, according to the Korean Bar Association in Seoul.

In his memoir about the six years he spent in two of the camps, Kim Yong, a former lieutenant colonel in the North Korean army, says the appeal of suicide was ‘overwhelming’.

‘Prisoners were beyond the point of feeling hungry, so they felt constantly delirious,’ wrote Kim, who said he spent two years at Camp 14 until he was transferred across the Taedong River to Camp 18, a political prison where guards were less brutal and prisoners had slightly more freedom.

Trying to end the delirium he felt in Camp 14, Kim said he jumped down a coal-mine shaft. After tumbling to the bottom of the mine, badly injured, he felt more disappointment than pain: ‘I regretted that I could not find a better way to really put an end to this indescribable torment.’[12]

As wretched as Shin’s life became after the execution of his mother and brother, suicide for him was never more than a passing thought.

There was a fundamental difference, in his view, between prisoners who arrived from the outside and those who were born in the camp: many outsiders, shattered by the contrast between a comfortable past and a punishing present, could not find or maintain the will to survive. A perverse benefit of birth in the camp was a complete absence of expectations.

And so Shin’s misery never skidded into complete hopelessness. He had no hope to lose, no past to mourn, no pride to defend. He did not find it degrading to lick soup off the floor. He was not ashamed to beg a guard for forgiveness. It didn’t trouble his conscience to betray a friend for food. These were merely survival skills, not motives for suicide.

Teachers at Shin’s school rarely rotated to other jobs. In the seven years since he’d entered school, he had known only two teachers. But four months after the execution, Shin had a break. One morning, the teacher who tormented him — and who encouraged his classmates to do likewise — was gone.

His replacement gave no outward indications that he would be any less abusive. Like nearly every guard in the camp, he was a nameless, bullish-looking man in his early thirties who demanded that students avert their eyes and bow their heads when they spoke to him. Shin remembers him being just as cold, distant and domineering as the others.

The new teacher, though, did not seem to want Shin to die of malnutrition.

By March 1997, about four months after his release from the underground prison, starvation had become a real possibility for Shin. Harassed by his teacher and fellow students, he could not find enough nourishment to maintain his weight. He also could not seem to recover from his burns. His scars still bled. He grew weaker and often failed to complete his work assignments, which led to more beatings, less food, more bleeding.

The new teacher took Shin to the cafeteria after mealtimes, where he told the boy to eat whatever leftovers he could find. He sometimes sneaked food to Shin. He also assigned him less arduous work and made certain that Shin had a warm place to sleep on the floor of the student dormitory.

Just as importantly, the new teacher prevented Shin’s classmates from hitting him and stealing his food. The taunting about his dead mother ended. Hong Joo Hyun, the class leader who had struck him in the face with a shovel, became his friend again. Shin put on some weight. The burns on his back finally healed.

Perhaps the teacher felt pity for a picked-on child who had watched his mother die. It is also possible that senior guards in the camp had found out that a disgruntled teacher was mistreating a reliable snitch. Perhaps the replacement teacher was ordered to keep the boy alive.

Why the new teacher made the effort, Shin never knew. But Shin is certain that without his help he would have died.

10

Tractors hauled food to the work site every day. There were heaps of milled corn and steaming vats of cabbage soup.

Shin was fifteen and working alongside thousands of prisoners. It was 1998 and they were building a hydroelectric dam on the Taedong River, which forms the southern border of Camp 14. The project was urgent enough to warrant filling the stomachs of slave labourers three times a day. Guards also allowed workers — about five thousand adult prisoners and a couple of hundred students from the camp’s secondary school — to catch fish and frogs from the river.

For the first time in his life, Shin ate well for an entire year.

The North Korean government had decided that the camp, with its high-voltage fence and factories that churned out military uniforms, glassware and cement, needed a reliable local source of electricity, and fast.

‘Hey! Hey! Hey! It’s falling! Falling!’

Shin shouted the warning. He was hauling platters of wet concrete to the crew when he noticed that a freshly poured concrete wall had cracked and was beginning to collapse. Beneath it, a crew of eight was finishing another wall.

He screamed as loudly as he could. But it was too late.

All the workers — three adults, along with three fifteen-year-old girls and two fifteen-year-old boys — were killed. Several were crushed beyond recognition. The supervising guard did not halt work after the accident. At the end of the shift, he simply ordered Shin and other workers to dispose of the bodies.

The mountains of North Korea are crisscrossed with swift rivers, large and small. Their hydropower potential is such that ninety per cent of the electricity on the Korean Peninsula prior to partition came from the North.[13]

But under the Kim family dynasty, the North Korean government has failed to build or maintain a reliable national electricity grid linked to hydroelectric dams, many of which are located in remote areas. When the Soviet Union stopped supplying cheap fuel oil in the early 1990s, city-based, oil-powered generators sputtered to a halt and the lights went out across much of the country. Most of the time, they are still out.

Satellite photographs of the Korean Peninsula at night show a black hole between China and South Korea. There is not enough power in the country even to keep the lights on in Pyongyang, where the government tries to pamper the elite. In February 2008, when I travelled for three days and two nights to Pyongyang as part of a large delegation of foreign journalists to cover a performance by the New York Philharmonic, the government managed to turn on the lights in much of the city. When the orchestra and the press left town, the lights went out again.

It makes sense, then, that the construction of small- and medium-sized hydroelectric plants, capable of serving local industry and built mostly by hand, using basic technology, has been a priority since the 1990s. In a frenzy of hard labour, thousands have been built.

Besides staving off economic collapse, the dams are ideologically beguiling to the family that runs the country. As his hagiographers tell the story, Kim Il Sung’s most important intellectual achievement — his brilliant juche idea — asserts that national pride goes hand in glove with self-reliance.

As the Great Leader explained it:

None of this, of course, is even remotely possible in a country as ill-governed as North Korea. It has always depended on handouts from foreign governments, and if these end, the Kim dynasty would probably collapse. Even in the best of years, it cannot feed itself. North Korea has no oil, and its economy has never been able to generate enough cash to buy sufficient fuel or food on the world market.

North Korea would have lost the Korean War and disappeared as a state without the help of the Chinese, who fought the United States and other Western forces to a stalemate. Until the 1990s, North Korea’s economy was largely held together by subsidies from the Soviet Union. From 2000 to 2008, South Korea propped up the North — and bought itself a measure of peaceful coexistence — with huge unconditional gifts of fertilizer and food, along with generous investment.

Since then, Pyongyang has become increasingly dependent on China for concessional trade, food aid and fuel. A telling measure of China’s growing influence is that in the months prior to Kim Jong Eun’s official emergence in 2010 as the chosen successor to Kim Jong Il, the ailing elder Kim travelled twice to Beijing, where diplomats say he asked for China to bless his succession plan.

Reality notwithstanding, North Korea champions self-reliance as the sine qua non of the country’s much-advertised goal of becoming ‘a great, prosperous and powerful nation’ by 2012, the one-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Kim Il Sung.

To that fantastical end, the government regularly enlists the masses in miserable tasks dressed up in noble slogans. The propaganda can be quite creative: the famine was repackaged as the ‘Arduous March’, a patriotic struggle that North Koreans were encouraged to win with the inspiring slogan: ‘Let’s Eat Two Meals Per Day’.

In the spring of 2010, as food shortages again became severe, the government launched a massive back-to-the-farm campaign to persuade city dwellers to move to the countryside and raise crops. These urbanites were to be permanent reinforcements for ‘rice-planting combat’, the annual campaign that sends office workers, students and soldiers to the country-side for two months in the spring and two weeks in the fall. In the winter, city people are charged with collecting their faeces — and that of their neighbours — for spring planting.

Other urgent and patriotic tasks that North Koreans have been urged to shoulder include ‘Let’s Breed More High-Yielding Fish!’ ‘Let’s Expand Goat Rearing and Create More Grassland in Accordance with the Party!’ and ‘Let’s Grow More Sunflowers!’ The success of these hortatory campaigns has been mixed, at best, especially when it comes to the government’s highly unpopular efforts to lure city-bred people into back-breaking farm labour.

For the dam project inside Camp 14 there were no such problems with motivation.

As Shin witnessed it, soon after the guards announced a new ‘rally of endeavour’ to build a hydroelectric dam, thousands of adult prisoners marched from factories to makeshift dormitories erected near the north bank of the Taedong. Shin and his classmates moved out of their school dormitory. They all worked, ate and slept at the dam site, which was located about six miles southeast of the centre of the camp.

Labour on the dam, which satellite photographs show to be a substantial concrete structure spanning a wide river, with turbines and spillways hugging the northern bank, continued round the clock. Trucks hauled in cement, sand and rock. Shin saw only one diesel-powered excavator. Most of the digging and construction was done by workers using shovels, buckets and bare hands.

Shin had seen prisoners die in the camp before — of hunger, illness, beatings and at public executions — but not as a routine part of work.

The greatest loss of life at the dam occurred soon after fullscale construction began. A rainy season flash flood rolled down the Taedong in July 1998, sweeping away hundreds of dam workers and students. Shin watched them disappear from a perch on the riverbank where he was hauling sand. He was quickly put to work confirming the identities of dead students and burying their bodies.

On the third day after the flood, he remembers carrying the bloated body of a girl on his back. At first it was slack, but it soon became stiff, with rigid arms and legs splayed outward. To squeeze the body into a narrow, hand-dug grave, he had to push the limbs together.

Floodwaters stripped some drowned students of their clothes. When Hong Joo Hyun discovered a naked classmate amid the post-flood debris, he removed his own clothes and covered the body.

As the clean-up continued, Shin competed with many other students to find bodies. For each corpse they buried, guards rewarded them with one or two servings of rice.

The Taedong, as it flowed past Camp 14, was too wide and swift to freeze in the North Korean winter, allowing dam construction to continue year round. In December 1998, Shin was ordered to wade into the river’s shallows to pick up boulders. Unable to bear the cold and without the approval of his guard, he joined several other students who tried to wade out.

‘You come out of the water and I’ll starve you all, understand!’ their guard shouted.

Shivering uncontrollably, Shin kept working.

Students worked primarily as bottom-rung labourers. They often carried steel reinforcing rods to older workmen who tied them together with twine or wire as the dam rose from the riverbed in a chequerboard pattern of concrete blocks. None of the students had gloves, and in winter their hands often stuck to the cold rods. Handing over a ‘rebar’ sometimes meant ripping skin from one’s palms and fingers.

Shin remembers that when one of his classmates, Byun Soon Ho, complained about a fever and feeling unwell, a guard gave him a lesson in the benefits of stoicism.

‘Soon Ho, stick out your tongue,’ the guard said.

He ordered the boy to press his tongue to a freezing rebar. Nearly an hour later, Soon Ho, tears in his eyes, his mouth oozing blood, managed to detach his tongue.

Working at the dam was dangerous, but Shin also found it exhilarating.

The primary reason was food. It was not particularly tasty, but month in, month out there was lots of it. Shin remembers mealtimes at the dam site as the happiest moments of his teen years. He regained all the weight and stamina he had lost in the underground prison, he could keep up at work and he became confident in his ability to survive.

Living near the dam also gave Shin a small measure of independence. In the summer, hundreds of students slept outdoors under a canopy. When they were not working, they could walk — during daylight hours — anywhere inside the sprawl of Camp 14. For his hard work, Shin earned a recommendation from his grade leader that allowed him to leave the dam site for four overnight visits to his father. Since they were not reconciled, Shin spent just one night with him.

He had worked at the dam for about a year when his time at secondary school came to an end in May 1999. The school had been little more than slave quarters from which he was sent out as a rock picker, weed puller and dam labourer, but graduation meant that, at the age of sixteen, he had become an adult worker. He was ready to be assigned to a permanent job inside the camp.

About sixty per cent of Shin’s class was assigned to the coal mines, where accidental death from cave-ins, explosions and gas poisonings was common. Many miners developed black lung disease after ten to fifteen years of working underground. Most miners died in their forties, if not before. As Shin understood it, an assignment in the mines was a death sentence.

The decision about who went where was made by Shin’s teacher, the man who two years earlier had saved Shin’s life by providing him with extra food and halting abuse from his classmates. The teacher handed down assignments without explanation, curtly telling students where they would spend the rest of their lives. As soon as the teacher made his announcements, new masters — foremen from camp factories, mines and farms — came to the school and led the students away.

The teacher told Hong Joo Hyun that he was going to the mines. Shin never saw him again.

The girl who lost her big toe in the mines at the age of eleven, Moon Sung Sim, was assigned to the textile factory.

Hong Sung Jo, the friend who saved Shin from his torturers by confirming that he’d informed on his mother and brother, was also sent to the mines. Shin never saw him again, either.

If there was a rationale behind the assignments, Shin never understood it. He thinks it came down to the personal whim of the teacher, who was consistently unreadable. Perhaps the teacher liked Shin. Perhaps he pitied him. Maybe he had been ordered to look out for the boy. Shin just doesn’t know.

In any case, the teacher again saved his life. He assigned him to a permanent job at Camp 14’s pig farm, where two hundred men and women raised about eight hundred pigs, along with goats, rabbits, chickens and a few cows. Feed for the animals was grown in fields surrounding the livestock pens.

‘Shin In Geun, you’re assigned to the ranch,’ the teacher told him. ‘Work hard.’

Nowhere else in Camp 14 was there so much food to steal.

11

Shin did not work hard.

The foremen would sometimes beat him and other workers who performed poorly, but not seriously and never to death. The pig farm was as good as it got for Shin at Camp 14. He even sneaked the occasional mid-afternoon nap.

Mealtime portions in the farm’s cafeteria were no larger than at the cement factory, the textile mill, or the mines. Nor was the food any better. But between meals, Shin could help himself to ground corn intended for the piglets he fed between November and July. Out in the fields, where he weeded and harvested from August to October, he snacked on corn, cabbage and other vegetables. On occasion, the foremen would bring a cooking pot out to the fields and everyone could eat his or her fill.

The farm was located up in the mountains, away from the river, about half an hour’s walk from Shin’s former school and the house where he had lived with his mother. Women with children walked back and forth to the farm from family housing, but most of the farm workers stayed in a dormitory on the mountain.

Shin slept there on the floor in a room for men. Bullying was not a problem. He did not have to fight for a warm patch of concrete. He slept well.

There was a slaughterhouse on the farm where fifty or so pigs were butchered twice a year, exclusively for guards and their families. As a prisoner, Shin was not allowed to eat pork or the meat of any livestock raised on the farm, but he and other prisoners could sometimes steal. The smell of roasting pork on the farm would alert guards, leading to beatings and weeks of half rations, so they ate purloined pork raw.

What Shin did not do on the farm was think, talk, or dream about the outside world.

No one there mentioned the escape plan that had led to the execution of his mother and brother. The guards did not ask Shin to snitch on fellow workers. The anger that overwhelmed him in the wake of his mother’s death receded into numbness. Before he was tortured, confined in the underground prison and exposed to Uncle’s stories about the world beyond the fence, Shin had been uninterested in anything beyond his next meal.

On the pig farm, that passive blankness returned. Shin uses the word ‘relaxing’ to describe his time on the camp farm, which lasted from 1999 to 2003.

Outside the camp during those years, however, life in North Korea was anything but relaxing.

Famine and floods in the mid-1990s all but destroyed the centrally planned economy. The government’s Public Distribution System, which had fed most North Koreans since the 1950s, collapsed. As a panicked response to hunger and starvation, bartering trade ran wild and private markets exploded in number and importance. Nine out of ten households traded to survive.[15] More and more North Koreans sneaked across the border into China for food, work, trade and flight to South Korea. Neither China nor North Korea released figures, but estimates of these economic migrants ranged from tens of thousands to four hundred thousand.

Kim Jong Il tried to control the chaos. His government created a new network of detention centres for traders who travelled without authorization. But with crackers and cigarettes they could often buy their freedom from hungry police and soldiers. Rail stations, open-air markets and back alleys in major towns became crowded with starving drifters. The many orphaned children found in these places became known as ‘wandering sparrows’.

Shin did not yet know this, but grassroots capitalism, vagabond trading and rampant corruption were creating cracks in the police state that surrounded Camp 14.

Food aid from the United States, Japan, South Korea and other donors mitigated the worst of the famine by the late 1990s. But in an indirect and accidental way, it also energized the market ladies and travelling entrepreneurs who would give Shin sustenance, cover and guidance in his escape to China.

Unlike any other aid recipient in the world, North Korea’s government insisted on sole authority for transporting donated food. The demand angered the United States, the country’s largest aid donor, and frustrated the monitoring techniques that the UN World Food Programme had developed around the world to track aid and make sure it reached the intended recipients. But since the need was so urgent and the death toll so high, the West swallowed its disgust and delivered more than one billion dollars’ worth of food to North Korea between 1995 and 2003.

During these years, refugees from North Korea arrived in the South and told government officials that they had seen donated rice, wheat, corn, vegetable oil, non-fat dried milk, fertilizer, medicine, winter clothing, blankets, bicycles and other aid items on sale in private markets. Pictures and videos taken in the markets showed bags of grain marked as ‘A Gift from the American People’.

Bureaucrats, party officials, army officers and other well-placed government elites ended up stealing about thirty per cent of the aid, according to estimates by outside scholars and international aid agencies. They sold it to private traders, often for dollars or euros, and delivered the goods using government vehicles.

Without intending to do so, wealthy donor countries injected a kind of adrenaline rush into the grubby world of North Korean street trading. The lucrative theft of international food aid whetted the appetite of higher-ups for easy money as it helped transform private markets into the country’s primary economic engine.

Private markets, which today supply most of the food North Koreans eat, have become the fundamental reason why most outside experts say a catastrophic 1990s-style famine is unlikely to happen again. The markets, though, have not come close to eliminating hunger or malnutrition. They also appear to have increased inequity, creating a chasm between those who have figured out how to trade and those who have not.

In late 1998, a few months before Shin was assigned to the pig farm, the World Food Programme conducted a nutrition survey of children, which covered seventy per cent of North Korea. It found that about two thirds of those surveyed were stunted or underweight. The numbers were double that of Angola, then at the end of a long civil war, and the North Korean government became furious when they were released to the public.

Ten years later, when private markets in the North were well established and selling everything from imported fruit to Chinese-made CD players, nutrition in state-run institutions for children and the elderly had barely improved, according to a World Food Programme nutrition survey that was tolerated by the government as a condition of receiving aid.

‘The children looked very sad, very emaciated, very pathetic,’ a nutritionist who worked on the 2008 food survey told me. She had participated in previous nutrition surveys dating back to the late 1990s and concluded that chronic hunger and severe malnutrition had persisted in much of North Korea despite the spread of markets.

International nutrition surveys have also found a pervasive pattern of geographic inequity. Hunger, stunting and wasting diseases are three to four times more prevalent in remote provinces of North Korea — home to the hostile classes — than they are in and around Pyongyang.

As Shin found in the labour camp, the most secure place for powerless North Koreans to live amid chronic hunger is a farm. By all indications, farmers — excepting those whose land was ruined by floods — weathered the famine far better than city dwellers. Even though they worked on cooperative farms, where crops belonged to the state, they were in a position to hide and hoard food, as well as selling it for cash or trading it for clothing and other necessities.

The government had little choice — after the famine, the collapse of its food-distribution system and the rise of private markets — but to offer farmers higher prices and increase incentives to grow more food. Private farming on small plots of land was legalized in 2002. This allowed more private farm-to-market trade, which increased the power of traders and the autonomy of productive farmers.

Kim Jong Il, however, never warmed to market reform and his government called it ‘honey-coated poison’.

‘It is important to decisively frustrate capitalist and non-socialist elements in their bud,’ according to the Rodong Sinmun, the party newspaper in Pyongyang. ‘Once the imperialist ideological and cultural poisoning is tolerated, even the faith unshakable before the threat of a bayonet will be bound to give in like a wet mud-wall.’

The capitalism that bloomed in the cities and small towns of North Korea weakened the government’s iron grip on everyday life and did little to enrich the state. Kim Jong Il grumbled publicly, saying, ‘Frankly the state has no money, but individuals have two years’ budget worth.’[16]

His government counter-attacked.

As part of the ‘military first’ era that Kim’s government officially proclaimed in 1999, the Korean People’s Army, with more than a million soldiers to feed three times a day, moved aggressively to confiscate a substantial slice of all food grown on cooperative farms.

‘At harvest time, soldiers bring their own trucks to the farms and just take,’ Kwon Tae-jin, a specialist on North Korean agriculture at the Korea Rural Economic Institute, which is funded by the South Korean government, told me in Seoul.

In the far north, where food supplies are historically lean and farmers are regarded as politically hostile, the military takes a quarter of total grain production, Kwon said. In other areas of the country, it takes five to seven per cent. To make sure that workers at state farms do not short change the military, the army stations soldiers at all three thousand of the farms throughout the harvest season. When tens of thousands of city dwellers are brought to the farms to assist with the fall harvest, soldiers monitor them to make sure they do not steal food.

The permanent deployment of soldiers on farms has spawned corruption. Kwon said that farm managers pay off soldiers, who then turn a blind eye to large-scale theft of food that is later sold in private markets. Disputes among groups of corrupt soldiers periodically lead to fistfights and shootouts, according to a number of defectors and reports by aid groups. Good Friends, the Buddhist aid group with informants in the North, reported in 2009 that one soldier on a state farm was stabbed with a sickle during a fight over corn.

Sealed away on the pig farm, Shin heard nothing about the street trading, corruption and extralegal intercity travel that would, in less than two years’ time, help him escape.

Holed up on a mountaintop that was a kind of camp within the camp, he drifted uneventfully through the last of his teenage years, keeping his head down, his mind blank and his energies focused on stealing food. His most vivid memory of those years was getting busted for barbecuing stolen pig intestines. He was beaten, deprived of food for five days, and his cafeteria rations were cut in half for three months.

Turning twenty on the farm, he believed he had found the place where he would grow old and die.

But the pig farm interlude ended abruptly in March 2003. For reasons never explained, Shin was transferred to the camp’s garment factory, a crowded, chaotic, stressful work site where two thousand women and five hundred men made military uniforms.

At the factory, Shin’s life again became complicated. There was relentless pressure to meet production quotas, as well as renewed pressure to snitch. Guards scavenged for sex among the factory’s seamstresses.

There was also a newcomer, an educated prisoner from Pyongyang. He had been schooled in Europe and had lived in China. He was to tell Shin about what he was missing.

12

A thousand women stitched together military uniforms during twelve-hour shifts, and when their temperamental foot-powered sewing machines broke down, Shin fixed them.

He was responsible for about fifty machines and the seam-stresses who operated them. If the machines did not spew out their daily quota of army uniforms, Shin and the seamstresses were forced to perform ‘bitter humiliation work’, which meant two extra hours on the floor of the factory, usually from ten to midnight.

Experienced seamstresses could keep their machines in working order, but those who were new, inept, or very ill could not. To fix a broken machine, which was forged out of cast iron at a foundry inside Camp 14, Shin and the other repairmen had to haul it on their backs to a repair shop upstairs.

The extra labour incensed many of the repairmen, who took their anger out on the seamstresses by grabbing their hair, slamming their heads against walls and kicking them in the face. Foremen in the factory, who were prisoners chosen by guards for their toughness, generally looked the other way when seamstresses were beaten. They told Shin that fear encouraged production.

Although he was still short and skinny, Shin was no longer a passive, malnourished, torture-traumatized child. During his first year in the factory, he proved this to himself and to his coworkers in a confrontation with another sewing-machine repairman.

Gong Jin Soo was a hot head. Shin had watched him go into a rage when one of the seamstresses in Gong’s stable broke the axle of her sewing machine. Gong kicked the woman in the face until she collapsed to the floor.

When Gong demanded a feed dog — a crucial part of a sewing machine that controls stitch size by regulating the speed of fabric moving to the needle — from a seamstress who worked with Shin, she curtly refused.

As Shin watched, Gong punched her in the face and bloodied her nose.

Astonishing himself and his seamstresses, Shin lost his composure. He grabbed a large wrench and swung it as hard as he could, trying to crack open Gong’s skull. The wrench crunched into his forearm, which Gong raised just in time to protect his head.

Gong yowled and fell to the floor. The shift foreman who had trained Shin rushed over. He found Shin, wild-eyed and wrench in hand, standing over Gong, whose bloody arm had a lump on it the size of an egg. The foreman slapped Shin’s face and took his wrench, the seamstresses returned to sewing and from then on, Gong kept his distance.

The garment factory is a sprawling cluster of seven large buildings, all of which are visible on satellite photographs. Located near the Taedong River, its grounds lie at the entrance to Valley 2, not far from the hydroelectric dam and factories that make glassware and porcelain.

During Shin’s time at the garment factory, there were dormitories on the grounds for the seamstresses and the men who worked in sewing-machine repair, garment design, plant maintenance and shipping. The factory superintendent was the only Bowiwon on the site. All the other foremen, including the chongbanjang, or head foreman, were prisoners.

Working in the factory put Shin in close daily contact with several hundred women in their teens, twenties and thirties. Some were strikingly attractive, and their sexuality created tension on the factory floor. Part of this was due to their ill-fitting uniforms and the fact that they had no bras and few wore underwear. Sanitary napkins were not available.

As a twenty-year-old virgin, Shin was nervous around these women. They interested him, but he worried about the camp rule that prescribed death for prisoners who had sexual relations without prior approval. Shin said he was careful not to get involved with any of the women, but the prohibition on sex meant nothing to the factory superintendent and the handful of favoured prisoners who served as foremen.

The superintendent, a guard in his thirties, wandered among the seamstresses like a buyer at a cattle auction. Shin watched him choose a different girl every few days, ordering her to come and clean his room, which was located inside the factory. Seamstresses not cleaning the superintendent’s room were fair game for the chief foreman and other prisoners with supervisory jobs in the factory.

Women had no choice but to comply. There was also something in it for them, at least in the short term. If they pleased the superintendent or one of the foremen, they could expect less work and more food. If they broke a sewing machine, they were not beaten.

One seamstress who regularly cleaned the superintendent’s room was Park Choon Young, whom Shin knew from secondary school and who operated a sewing machine that he maintained. She was twenty-two and exceptionally pretty. Four months after she began spending afternoons in the superintendent’s room, Shin heard from another former schoolfriend that she was pregnant.

Her condition was kept secret until her belly began to poke through her uniform, then she disappeared.

Shin learned how to tell from a sewing machine’s sound what was wrong with it, but he was less adept at lugging the bulky machines to the repair shop. In the summer of 2004, while carrying one up a flight of stairs on his back, it slipped from his grasp. The sewing machine tumbled down the stairwell, broken beyond repair.

His immediate superior, the foreman who had been patient with Shin as he learned the ropes in the factory, slapped Shin a few times when he saw the ruined machine and reported the damage up the factory’s chain of command. Sewing machines were considered more valuable than prisoners, and ruining one was regarded as a grave offence.

A few minutes after he dropped the sewing machine, Shin was called into the office of the plant superintendent, along with the chief foreman and the floor foreman who had reported the incident.

‘What were you thinking?’ the superintendent shouted at Shin. ‘Do you want to die? How could you be so weak that you lost your grip? You’re always stuffing your face with food.’

‘Even if you die, the sewing machine can’t be brought back,’ the superintendent added. ‘Your hand is the problem. Cut his finger off!’

The chief foreman grabbed Shin’s right hand and held it down on a table in the superintendent’s office. With a kitchen knife, he hacked Shin’s middle finger off just above the first knuckle.

Shin’s foreman helped him leave the superintendent’s office and escorted him back to the factory floor. Later that night, the foreman took Shin to the camp’s health centre, where a prisoner who worked as a nurse soaked his finger in salt water, stitched it up and wrapped it in cloth.

That did not keep it from getting infected. But from his time in the underground cell, Shin remembered how Uncle had rubbed salted cabbage soup into his wounds. At mealtimes, Shin soaked his finger in soup. The infection did not spread into the bone and within three months new skin healed over the stumpy finger.

For the first two days after the injury, Shin’s foreman filled in on the factory floor. It was an unexpected gesture of concern that allowed Shin to recover. The kind foreman did not last long on the job. He disappeared, along with his wife, a few months after Shin dropped the sewing machine. Shin heard from other repairmen that the foreman’s wife, while out working in the woods, had stumbled upon a secret execution in a mountain gorge.

Before the foreman disappeared, he brought Shin a gift.

‘It’s rice flour, and your father wants you to have it,’ the foreman said.

At the mention of his father’s name, Shin became angry. Although he had tried to repress it, the resentment he felt towards his mother and brother had grown since their deaths, poisoning his feelings for his father. Shin wanted nothing to do with him.

‘You eat it,’ Shin said.

‘Your father intended it for you,’ the foreman replied, looking puzzled. ‘Shouldn’t you eat it?’

Despite his hunger, Shin refused.

With so many prisoners working so close together, the factory was a petri dish for snitching.

A co-worker betrayed Shin a few weeks after he dropped the sewing machine. His shift had failed to meet the day’s production quota and was required to do bitter humiliation work. Along with three other repairmen, Shin did not get back to his dormitory room until after midnight.

They were all wildly hungry and one suggested they raid the factory’s vegetable garden, where there were cabbages, lettuce, cucumbers, eggplant and radishes. It was raining and there was no moonlight, so they figured the chances of being caught were low. They snuck outside, filled their arms with vegetables and brought them back to their room, where they ate and fell asleep.

In the morning, the four were called to the superintendent’s office. Someone had reported their midnight meal. The superintendent whacked each of them on the head with a stick. He then told one repairman, Kang Man Bok, to leave the room. A snitch can smell a snitch, and Shin instinctively knew Kang had informed.

The superintendent ordered that rations for the three remaining men be cut in half for two weeks, and he clubbed them on the head a few more times. Returning to the factory, Shin noticed that Kang would not meet his eye.

Soon, Shin was asked to spy on his fellow workers. The superintendent called him to his office and said that to wash away the sins of his mother and brother, he had to report wrong-doers. It took Shin two months before he found one.

Lying sleepless on the floor one night, he watched as a roommate, a transport worker named Kang Chul Min, who was in his late twenties, got up and began mending his work trousers. He used a swatch of military uniform cloth to cover a hole in his pants. Apparently he had stolen the cloth from the factory floor.

The following morning, Shin went to the superintendent.

‘Teacher, I saw a stolen piece of cloth.’

‘Really? Who had it?

‘It was Kang Chul Min, in my room.’

Shin worked late that night in the factory and was among the last of the sewing-machine repairmen to walk into a ten o’clock meeting of ideological struggle, a mandatory session of self-criticism.

As he entered the room, he saw Kang Chul Min. He was on his knees and bound in chains. His bare back was covered with welts from a whip. His secret girlfriend, a seamstress whom Shin had heard rumours about, knelt beside him. She, too, was in chains. They remained kneeling in silence throughout the ninety-minute meeting. When it ended, the superintendent ordered each worker to slap Kang and his girlfriend in the face before leaving the room. Shin slapped them both.

He heard that they were then dragged outside and forced to kneel on a concrete floor for several more hours. The two never figured out who had reported the stolen cloth. Shin did his best to avoid their eyes.

13

The superintendent had another job for Shin.

Park Yong Chul, short and stout, with a shock of white hair, was an important new prisoner. He had lived abroad, his wife was well-connected and he knew senior people in the North Korean government.

The superintendent ordered Shin to teach Park how to fix sewing machines and to become his friend. Shin was to report back on everything Park said about his past, his politics and his family.

‘Park needs to confess,’ the superintendent said. ‘He’s holding out on us.’

In October 2004, Shin and Park began spending fourteen hours a day together in the garment factory. Park paid polite attention to Shin’s instructions on sewing-machine maintenance. Just as politely, he avoided questions about his past. Shin learned little.

Then, after four weeks of near silence, Park surprised Shin with a personal question.

‘Sir, where is your home?’

‘My home?’ Shin said. ‘My home is here.’

‘I am from Pyongyang, sir,’ Park said.

Park addressed Shin using honorific nouns and verb endings. In the Korean language, they signified the seniority and superiority of Shin the teacher over Park the apprentice. Park was a dignified man in his mid-forties, but the linguistic fussiness annoyed and embarrassed Shin.

‘I’m younger than you,’ Shin said. ‘Please drop the honorific with me.’

‘I will,’ said Park.

‘By the way,’ asked Shin, ‘where is Pyongyang?’

Shin’s question stunned Park.

The older man, though, did not laugh or make light of Shin’s ignorance. He seemed intrigued by it. He carefully explained that Pyongyang, located about fifty miles south of Camp 14, was the capital of North Korea, the city where all the country’s powerful people lived.

The ice had been broken by Shin’s naïveté. Park began to talk about himself. He said he had grown up in a large, comfortable apartment in Pyongyang and had followed the privileged educational trajectory of North Korea’s elites, studying in East Germany and the Soviet Union. After returning home, he had become chief of a tae kwon do training centre in Pyongyang. In that high-profile job, Park said, he had met many of the men who ruled North Korea.

Touching his oil-stained right hand to a sewing machine, Park said, ‘With this hand, I shook Kim Jong Il’s hand.’

Park looked like an athlete. His hands were large and meaty. He was impressively strong, if a bit thick around the middle. But what impressed Shin was Park’s decency. He did not make Shin feel stupid. He patiently attempted to explain what life was like outside Camp 14 — and outside North Korea.

So began a month-long one-on-one seminar that would change Shin’s life for ever.

As they walked the factory floor, Park told Shin that the giant country next door to Korea was called China. Its people were rapidly getting rich. He said that in the south there was another Korea. In South Korea, he said, everyone was already rich. Park explained the concept of money. He told Shin about the existence of television, computers and mobile phones. He explained that the world was round.

Much of what Park talked about, especially at the beginning, was difficult for Shin to understand, believe, or care about. Shin wasn’t especially interested in how the world worked. What delighted him — what he kept begging Park for — were stories about food and eating, particularly when the main course was grilled meat.

These were the stories that kept Shin up at night fantasizing about a better life. Partly it was the grinding exhaustion of work in the factory — meals were skimpy, the hours were endless and Shin was always hungry — but there was something more, something buried in Shin’s memory from when he was thirteen and struggling to recover from his burns in the underground prison. His aging cellmate had inflamed his imagination with tales of hearty meals. Uncle had dared Shin to dream about one day getting out of the camp and eating whatever he wanted. Freedom, in Shin’s mind, was just another word for grilled meat.

While the old man in the underground prison had eaten well in North Korea, Park’s gustatory adventures were global. He described the enchantments of chicken, pork and beef in China, Hong Kong, Germany, England and the former Soviet Union. The more Shin listened to these stories, the more he wanted out of the camp. He ached for a world where an insignificant person like himself could walk into a restaurant and fill his stomach with rice and meat. He fantasized about escaping with Park because he wanted to eat like Park.

Intoxicated by what he heard from the prisoner he was supposed to betray, Shin made perhaps the first free decision of his life. He chose not to snitch.

It marked a major shift in his calculations about how to survive. Based on Shin’s experience, snitching paid. It saved him from the executioners who killed his mother and brother. After the execution, it may have been the reason his second secondary school teacher made sure he had food, put a stop to the abuse Shin suffered at the hands of his fellow students and assigned him to an easy job on the pig farm.

Shin’s decision to honour Park’s confidences did not signify new insight into the nature of right and wrong. Looking back, Shin views his behaviour as fundamentally selfish. If he informed on Park, he could have earned an extra serving of cabbage, but Park’s stories were much more valuable to Shin. They became an essential and energizing addiction, changing his expectations about the future and giving him the will to plan for it. He believed he would go mad without hearing more.

In his reports to the superintendent, Shin found himself telling a wonderfully liberating lie. Park, he said, had nothing to say.

A decade earlier in the underground prison, Shin’s aging cellmate had dared to talk about food outside the camp. But Uncle had never talked about himself or his politics. He was careful, suspicious and withholding. He guessed Shin was an informer and he did not trust him. Shin took no offence. He saw it as normal. Trust was a good way to get shot.

But after Park’s initial reticence, he was not suspicious. In the apparent belief that Shin was as trustworthy as he was ignorant, Park told his life story.

Park told Shin he lost his position as head of tae kwon do training in Pyongyang in 2002, after squabbling with a mid-level apparatchik who apparently snitched on him to higher-ups in the government. Without a job, Park travelled north to the border with his wife, where they crossed illegally into China and stayed with his uncle for eighteen months. They intended to return to Pyongyang, where they had left behind a teenage child who lived with Park’s parents.

While in China, Park listened daily to radio broadcasts from South Korea. He paid close attention to coverage of Hwang Jang Yop, a principal architect of North Korea’s ideology and the highest-ranking official ever to defect. Hwang, who fled in 1997, had become a celebrity in Seoul.

As Shin and Park did their rounds in the garment factory, Park explained that Hwang had criticized Kim Jong Il for turning North Korea into a corrupt feudal state. Kim’s government dispatched agents in 2010 to try to assassinate Hwang. The agents, however, were arrested in Seoul, and Hwang died of natural causes that year at eighty-seven.

Park left China and returned to North Korea in the summer of 2003, along with his wife and a baby son born in China. He wanted to get back to Pyongyang in time to vote in the August election for the Supreme People’s Assembly, the rubber-stamp parliament of North Korea.

Elections in North Korea are empty rituals. Candidates are chosen by the Korean Workers’ Party and run without opposition. But Park feared that if he missed the vote, the government would notice his absence, declare him to be a traitor and send his family to a labour camp. Voting in North Korea is not mandatory, but the government keeps close track of those who do not show up.

At the border, North Korean authorities detained Park and his family. He tried to convince them that he wasn’t a defector and had merely been visiting family in China and was coming home to vote, but the authorities did not buy it. They accused him of being a convert to Christianity and a spy for South Korea. After several rounds of interrogation, Park and his wife and son were sent to Camp 14. Park was assigned to the camp’s textile factory in the autumn of 2004.

When Shin met him, Park was furious with himself for returning to North Korea. His foolishness had cost him his freedom and, as he told Shin, it would soon cost him his wife, who was divorcing him. She came from a prominent family in Pyongyang with strong party connections, Park said, and she was trying to convince camp guards that she had been a loyal and submissive wife while her husband was a political criminal.

Despite Park’s anger — at the rottenness of North Korea, his wife and himself — he always carried himself with dignity, especially when it was time to eat.

Shin found this utterly amazing. Everyone he knew in the camp behaved like a panicked animal at mealtimes. Park, even when hungry, did not. When Shin caught rats in the factory, Park insisted on patience. He refused to allow Shin to eat them until they’d found a furnace or flame where the rat could be spread out on the head of a shovel and cooked properly.

Park could also be a blithe spirit. In Shin’s view, he sometimes took this a bit too far.

Take, for example, Park’s singing.

In the middle of a night shift on the floor of the factory, Park alarmed Shin by bursting into song.

‘Hey! What do you think you are doing?’ Shin asked, fearing that a foreman might hear.

‘Singing,’ Park said.

‘Stop at once,’ Shin told him.

Shin had never sung a song. His only exposure to music had been on the farm, when trucks with loudspeakers played military marching music while prisoners picked weeds. To Shin, singing seemed unnatural and insanely risky.

‘Would you like to sing with me?’ Park asked.

Shin vigorously shook his head and waved his hands, trying to silence Park.

‘Who would hear me at this hour?’ Park said. ‘Sing after me this once.’

Shin refused.

Park asked why he was so afraid of a little song when he was willing to hear seditious stories about how Kim Jong Il was a thief and North Korea was a hellhole?

Shin explained that he tolerated such things because Park had the good sense to whisper. ‘I wish you wouldn’t sing,’ Shin said.

Park agreed not to. But a few nights later, he again broke into song and offered to teach Shin the lyrics. Although dubious and afraid, Shin listened and sang with Park, but quietly.

The lyrics of ‘Song of the Winter Solstice’, which recent defectors say is the theme song of a popular programme on North Korean state television, are about travelling companions who endure hardship and pain.

As we all walk down life’s long, long road,

We will remain warm travelling companions, standing against the lashes of wind and rain.

Along that road there will be happiness and suffering.

We will overcome; we will endure all of life’s tempests.

It is still the only song Shin knows.

In November, not long after Park was assigned to the textile factory, four Bowiwon guards paid a surprise visit to the prisoners’ nightly meeting of self-criticism. Two of them were unfamiliar faces and Shin believed they were from outside the camp.

As the meeting ended, the chief guard said he wanted to talk about lice, a chronic problem in the camps. He asked prisoners to step forward if they were infested.

A man and a woman who were leaders in their respective dormitory rooms stood. They said lice were out of control in their quarters. Guards gave each of them a bucket filled with a cloudy liquid that smelled, to Shin, like agricultural chemicals.

To demonstrate its effectiveness in controlling lice, the guards asked five men and five women in each of the infested dorm rooms to wash themselves with the cloudy liquid. Shin and Park, of course, had lice, but they were not given an opportunity to use the treatment.

In about a week, all ten prisoners who had washed with the liquid developed boils on their skin. After several weeks, their skin began to putrefy and flake off. They had high fevers that kept them from working. Shin saw a truck arrive at the factory and watched as the ailing prisoners were loaded into it. He never saw them again.

It was then, in mid-December 2004, that Shin decided he had had enough and began thinking about escape.

Park made those thoughts possible. He changed the way Shin connected with other people. Their friendship broke a lifelong pattern, stretching back to Shin’s malignant relationship with his mother, of wariness and betrayal.

Shin was no longer a creature of his captors. He believed he had found someone to help him survive.

Their relationship echoed, in many ways, the bonds of trust and mutual protection that kept prisoners alive and sane in Nazi concentration camps. In those camps, researchers found, the ‘basic unit of survival’ was the pair, not the individual.

‘[I]t was in the pairs that the prisoners kept alive the semblance of humanity,’ concluded Elmer Luchterhand, a sociologist at Yale who interviewed fifty-two concentration camp survivors shortly after liberation.[17]

Pairs stole food and clothing for each other, exchanged small gifts and planned for the future. If one member of a pair fainted from hunger in front of an SS officer, the other would prop him up.

‘Survival… could only be a social achievement, not an individual accident,’ wrote Eugene Weinstock, a Belgian resistance fighter and Hungarian-born Jew who was sent to Buchenwald in 1943.[18]

Finally the death of one member of a pair often doomed the other. Women who knew Anne Frank in the Bergen-Belsen camp said that neither hunger nor typhus killed the young girl who would become the most famous diarist of the Nazi era. Rather, they said, she lost the will to live after the death of her sister, Margot.[19]

Like Nazi concentration camps, labour camps in North Korea use confinement, hunger and fear to create a kind of Skinner box:[20] a closed, closely regulated chamber in which guards assert absolute control over prisoners.[21] Yet while Auschwitz existed for only three years, Camp 14 is a fifty-year-old Skinner box, an ongoing longitudinal experiment in repression and mind control in which guards breed prisoners whom they control, isolate and pit against each other from birth.

The miracle of Shin’s friendship with Park is how quickly it blew up the box.

Park’s spirit, his dignity and his incendiary information gave Shin something that was both enthralling and unbearable: a context, a way to dream about the future.

He suddenly understood where he was and what he was missing.

Camp 14 was no longer home; it was an abhorrent cage.

And Shin now had a well-travelled, broad-shouldered friend to help him get out.