They marched him inside the station, Shin dragging his makeshift rucksack behind him on the ground. All the energy had drained out of him. His face was smeared black from the coal dust blowing through the train. He felt wretched, pathetic, but he was also filled with an odd kind of relief. I don’t care, he thought. I’d rather die than be stuck here. They can do anything they want to me.
“Give me some water to clean up,” Shin said to the man from the state police.
“Give it to him,” the man drowsily ordered someone.
“Where’s the bathroom?”
They let Shin relieve himself and wash his hands and face. When he came outside, a jeep was pulling up near the tracks, the Deputy Director in the passenger seat, a furious look on his face. Shin could hear a helicopter thrumming up above. He closed his eyes and tried to empty his mind.
They handcuffed him, and led him outside.
* * *
It was like a scene from a movie, Shin thought when it was all over.
The helicopter hovered down to the ground at a small, deserted airfield. They pushed Shin out of the aircraft and bundled him into another jeep, a hood over his head, only taking it off once he was out of the car and inside a large building. He was led down a long corridor with stretches of identical doors on either side. His guards stopped at one of them, opened the door, and sat him on one of the three chairs that were the room’s only furnishings. On the other two, facing him, sat the Deputy Director and a fat man Shin didn’t know, so pudgy he sunk into his seat as if he had no spine. They both had pencils and paper in their hands.
The fat man spoke first, in a voice that shook from deep inside the blubber. “You were headed north, past Chongju, in North Pyongan Province. That’s pretty far north.” He seemed to reflect on that for a moment. “You were headed that way by mistake, yes?”
Shin didn’t know how to answer. “Did you take the wrong road or not?” the Deputy Director snapped. “Don’t you understand the question?”
“I meant to go in that direction,” Shin said.
“Why?” The Deputy Director’s voice was so angry and threatening that Shin felt it would pierce through his body.
“Because I couldn’t bear living here anymore,” Shin replied.
The fat one was scratching Shin’s answers down on his pad. The Deputy Director stood up and the fat man followed. As they left the room four guards stepped in, their cold eyes locked on Shin.
In a few minutes, the two interrogators returned and sat back down across from Shin.
“Then does this mean you lied in your New Year’s congratulatory letters?” the Deputy Director asked. Like Choi, Shin had been required to handwrite holiday letters of gratitude and admiration to both Kims.
“Answer the question!” the fat man bellowed.
“I wrote what I was told to write. I was writing letters to men I’ve never met. I thought I did quite well.”
The two stared at him, astounded. After what seemed like a long time the fat man blinked and wrote the answer down, and they left the room again. The four guards returned. As he sat there Shin realized his interviewers were relaying his answers to someone and then returning with that person’s next line of inquiry. It wasn’t hard to figure out who that person was likely to be. Kim Jong-Il probably can’t believe I wanted to escape after being treated so nicely, Shin thought.
The pair returned. “Where did you want to go?” the Deputy Director asked.
“I was headed for China.”
The two stepped out again, the four guards stepped in. A moment later, the interrogators returned with a new question.
“How did you plan to get there?”
“By riding the rails.”
“‘Riding the rails’?” the fat one echoed, as if he had never heard the expression.
“Yes. By riding the rails.”
They left the room again. The routine continued, back and forth, more times than Shin could count. When it was over he had told them everything. He felt nothing but exhaustion, fatigue like a heavy blank sheet blotting out every other emotion. They walked him outside and, blinking in the afternoon light, he realized he was in Pyongyang. A statue of the Great Leader, the omnipresent smile on his face, stood in the front yard.
Shin got back in the jeep. As the army vehicle drove through the city, Shin looked out the window. “It was a bleak, dismal scene. There were no signs of people. The streets were dead.”
It was December 30, 1978. They drove him to prison.
* * *
The North Korean prison system has existed for as long as the People’s Republic has. There are an unknown number of prison camps throughout the country. Though the DPRK regime officially denies their existence, many are clearly visible on Google Maps. They hold an estimated 220,000 prisoners. Every North Korean knows of someone—a family member, a friend, a work acquaintance—who was taken away in the middle of the night and sent to the prison camps, never to be seen again. Though no one speaks of them, everyone—everyone—knows about them.
The largest known prison camp, complete with mines and factories, covers a surface area greater than that of the entire city of Los Angeles. Citizens can be sent there for any offense—real, perceived, or trumped up—and, as North Korean law attributes collective guilt, a criminal’s act taints the rest of his or her bloodline, so that entire families, across three generations, are routinely condemned to hard labor or death. (Spouses, not being blood, are sometimes spared; but they are forced to divorce, their songbun is downgraded, their assets confiscated, and, if they have any relatives in the army or university, they are immediately expelled and “sent down to production,” which means being sent to work in the mines or iron-smelting furnaces.) The treatment in these prisons is so harsh and life threatening that a sentence longer than a few years is as good as the death penalty. Prisoners work long hours doing hard labor and are brutally punished if they fail to fulfill quotas. They are fed gruel and sadistically abused.
Because of the way North Korean society is subdivided, from the hostile class to the core class, only “trusted” citizens are allowed to work in the prison camps as guards. “Trusted,” in practice, means the wealthy elite. These guards are trained to dehumanize their prisoners, to see them as “dogs” or “animals” rather than people. They are also rewarded for preventing escapes, so stories abound of guards pretending to help a prisoner escape only to shoot or watch as he or she is electrocuted to death on electric wire, before dragging the body back to collect a bonus.
The worst internment camps, the kwanliso (literally “custody management center”), are for traitors, political prisoners, and anyone found guilty of committing an “anti-state” crime, such as plotting to take over, collaborating with the imperialists, or, more innocuously, reading a foreign newspaper or cracking jokes about either Kim’s appearance or intelligence. Modeled on the Soviet gulag, the kwanliso were set up by Kim Il-Sung shortly after he took power as places to send anyone who threatened his regime. Sentences to the kwanliso are never for anything less than life, and public executions are commonplace. It’s hard to know what, exactly, goes on in the kwanliso, as few ever escape to tell. According to a few witnesses, prisoners are not allowed to have sex, so in mixed-gender prisons abortions and the killing of newborns are sanctioned by the state. These forced abortions are carried out by injecting poison into the fetus, simply cutting the mother’s womb open or, if all else fails, strangling the child the second it has taken its first breath. Informing is rewarded, so prisoners routinely turn on each other, behavior strongly encouraged by the prison administration. One former prisoner described witnessing a failed escape attempt. As the would-be escapee lay beaten on the ground, the prison’s other inmates were ordered to walk across him, pounding and crushing his bones and organs until he died. When an inmate was killed by hanging, his fellow prisoners were ordered to throw stones at him while he kicked and thrashed. Bodies were then left out overnight, sometimes even for days, as a reminder and an example.
In some camps prisoners are assigned to each other, two by two, to watch each other as they sleep, reporting anything suspicious that might be said. Medieval torture—beating with sticks and rocks, hanging over bonfires, the sinking of hooks into the flesh, the breaking and ripping and chopping off of fingers and limbs—is used in interrogations. In something called the Clock Torture, the prisoner is made to stand on a table in front of the other prisoners; the warden or a guard then calls a time and the prisoner has to re-create the hands on a clock face with his body and hold the position until the next time is shouted out. This is done until the prisoner collapses, and is done to children and pregnant women just as often as to able-bodied men. Guards are authorized to rape. Children are executed in front of their mothers, wives in front of their husbands. If they don’t die of violence or torture, the inmates will often die in work accidents in the mines or in the blazing factories; and if they survive even that they will die of starvation or of one of the many untreated illnesses that abound in a place where people are not allowed to wash or to change their clothes, where they are made to eat filthy food and sleep huddled against one another on cold, mattressless floors. If an inmate dies, family outside will not be informed; and if a prisoner is eventually released, he or she will be made to sign a confidentiality agreement, undertaking never to disclose what happened behind bars. Most prisoners are never told what crime they were found guilty of committing in the first place.
Just one level down from the labor camps for political prisoners are the “reeducation camps,” or kyohwaso (literally “enlightenment centers”), with much the same conditions but smaller than the sprawling internment camps. There are about twenty such prisons all over North Korea, the inmates of which are termed “bad” or “subversive elements” guilty of political crimes, common crimes (murder, traveling without a permit), or economic crimes (Pyongyang’s euphemism for theft, illegal border crossings, smuggling, or illegal market trading and private enterprise). Unlike the internment camps, where prisoners are considered “irredeemable,” prisoners in these reeducation facilities undergo ideological instruction every day and can entertain a slight hope of returning to “normal” society. Some prisoners are kept in their cells, but the majority work every day from 7 a.m. to sunset, stopping only for dinner and for ideology sessions. Officially, the reeducation camps are not prisons but rehab facilities, and the government claims that the inmates, “unable to live with their guilty conscience(s),” turned themselves in and volunteered to stay there.
Here torture was still the norm. One woman, Lee Soon-Ok, says her interrogation for a petty offense began with being thrown on the floor and covered in a blanket while twenty or thirty men kicked and punched her repeatedly until she passed out. She was then questioned for three days straight and hit whenever she closed her eyes or drifted to sleep. She was abused for several months after that—shoved into a brick pottery kiln until she lost consciousness from the heat, flogged while strapped naked to a chair, strapped to a bench and had water forced down her throat, had her teeth punched out and sticks placed between her fingers and twisted. After passing out from one punishment she woke up to find two men standing on a plank laid across her stomach, and was unable to stand up for two weeks. Her crime was to have refused to give a senior security official extra fabric (beyond his allocated ration) to make himself a jacket in the style of one he had seen on Kim Jong-Il. The punishment for giving the official more than his allocated portion would have been equally bad or worse.
Another North Korean, a school principal, testified to having found the bodies of two teachers at his school; when he reported the crime he was arrested for the murders without any form of investigation. To extract a confession the state police tortured him with electricity until his ears and fingers literally melted. Later, when thieves confessed to the murders, he was released, lame and deformed, under the condition that he sign a form pledging he would never reveal his experience under pain of being imprisoned and tortured again.
There was, literally, no escape. If you killed yourself, and many did, your surviving family members were brought to the camp or, if they were there already, executed or sent to solitary confinement, locked in a cell so small there was only room to sit, with spikes sticking out of the walls to prevent prisoners from leaning against them for rest.
* * *
The detention center was loud and crowded. They made Shin strip, took his clothes, and handed him prison dress, which Shin felt sure was an old Chinese uniform from the Korean War. When he was done changing, they threw him in a solitary cell barely big enough to lie down in. There was one tiny slit of a barred window high up on the wall, a steel door on the other wall. The wooden floor was filthy with old bodily fluids. It felt like a dungeon chamber.
They brought him a stone bowl filled “with a mixture of corn and beans sprinkled with rice,” and an aluminum spoon with no handle. Two guards stood by the door.
“You must obey the rules I am about to tell you,” one of them barked. “First, until I give you instructions to sleep, you must sit up at attention with your back straight and your hands on your knees. You are to look straight ahead with your eyes wide open. You are not to move your head or your hands at all. Do you understand?” Shin nodded weakly. He took a mouthful of gruel and spat it out. It was full of stones. “Second: to use the toilet, you will raise your hand and ask for permission. Third: at lights out a bell will ring. When the bell rings you are allowed to move. After the bell rings we will check your cell and give you permission to lie down. Only then can you lie down. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
Shin forced himself to finish the food. The guards took the empty bowl and locked the steel door. The sun sank lower than the window, and Shin Sang-Ok was left in darkness.
* * *
In prison, Shin suffered from hunger, sickness, and loneliness. One of his toes, frostbitten during his escape attempt, became infected. He shivered with anxiety constantly and grew to crave food “like an animal.” As he sat in his cell, back straight and hands on his knees, he could hear other prisoners being beaten for disobeying orders or for breaking position without permission. One day he heard a woman cry and realized the prison was unisex. Fights broke out regularly among the guards, usually sparked by one of them calling another a “liberal” or a “democrat,” the two worst insults in the prison.
Shin was bewildered by his treatment. The guards cursed and barked at him as they did everyone else. He had neither soap nor toothpaste, instead using salt to brush his teeth, and he ate the same pebble-filled saltwater slop, always meatless but occasionally fortified with chunks of radish or cabbage, given to every other prisoner. But when he fell ill a doctor was called, and when the nights were cold the guards brought him several extra blankets, both luxuries other inmates were not afforded. When a certain woman was on kitchen duty, in addition to his gruel Shin received a bowl of rice pot tea, a staple Korean drink also known as burnt-rice tea, made by swirling some water around the pot used to cook rice, scraping the burnt rice off the bottom of the pot, and pouring the warm mixture into a cup. The tea tasted delicious, like his mother’s when he was a child.
His cell also seemed to have become the place where guards stopped on their patrols up and down the hall. Inevitably they would lean on the door and wait for him to notice their unmoving presence. Then, in a low voice, they would ask him questions about life in South Korea.
“In South Korea, there are places with women for entertainment, aren’t there?”
“Of course there are,” Shin replied.
“And if one goes there … can you fondle and fool around with the women?”
“Well…”
“If you pay them,” the sentry continued, “you can do anything, right? Right?”
Shin nodded. “Sure,” he said.
The man nodded, a grin on his face, and stepped away from the door.
The next day, a different guard asked Shin, “Can anyone buy chocolate in the South?”
“If one has money, one can go to any store and buy it,” Shin answered.
“You mean only the high-ranking officials, right?”
“No, everyone can.”
“Oh, sure!” The guard walked away, shaking his head.
“A wind this strong blows the roofs off all the huts in South Korea, doesn’t it?” another guard asked sarcastically, on a day when a gale was blowing around the detention center.
“I have a hard time with your capitalist smell,” yet another guard whispered. “How can you reek of it so much?”
“I smell like a capitalist?”
“That strong smell of cosmetics.” Shin realized the guard could still smell the Japanese soap he had used at the guesthouse. I can’t believe he can still smell it, let alone find it too strong, he thought.
The silent, snatched conversations gave Shin an opportunity to ask his own questions.
“Comrade—” he started with one guard.
“We are not your comrades. Call us ‘sir.’”
“Sir, where is this place?”
“What use is it for you to know?” the guard asked. “You want to know where you are? This is a detention center.”
“Is it the place for…?” Shin asked, drawing his hand across his throat. The guard shook his head.
“This isn’t that kind of place. Those people are put somewhere else.”
As the sun rose and set, Shin used stones picked from his rice to count the days, reaching up to place one on the windowsill every night before he went to sleep. Mice ran in and out of holes in the wall, climbing into the dry toilet and trying to feed on the feces within. When the guards weren’t looking Shin picked up his handleless spoon, the only object he was allowed inside his cell, and carved his name in the wall, then a full sentence. “The concrete wall was hard and my carving barely left a mark,” Shin said, “but slowly it started to become visible.” The sentence read Shin Sang-Ok died here one day in 1979. He didn’t expect to see the outside of the prison again. From now on his life was wasted. Maybe someone from the next generation would one day stand here and read the faded pronouncement. Maybe, one day, “my family and the world would know: I had no other way out.”
* * *
There were fifteen pebbles on the windowsill when Shin was called out of his cell by the center’s warden. The warden’s office was in a separate building about a hundred yards away; the guards drove Shin there in a jeep. He held his face out in the fresh air, relishing every second. Inside the warden’s office were his old instructor the Deputy Director, the warden, and a man Shin did not know, sent from the Ministry for Social Safety. The deputy director asked Shin if he regretted his actions and saw the error of his ways. Shin hung his head.
“I have given a lot of thought to my actions,” Shin said. “I realize how wrong I was. I didn’t know Comrade Kim Jong-Il’s true intention for me, so I made a foolish mistake.”
“Not just ‘Comrade’ Kim Jong-Il,” the man from the ministry cautioned, “but our beloved Leader Comrade Kim Jong-Il.”
“Yes, sir, I didn’t realize our beloved Leader Comrade Kim Jong-Il’s intent and I made a mistake. I have thought about my foolishness and repented.”
“Is there anything else?” the Deputy Director asked coldly. Shin’s escape must have gotten him in serious trouble. Shin couldn’t think of anything to say.
“Give me at least one egg a day, please,” he finally blurted out. The Deputy Director wrote down his answer and then he and the man from the ministry stood up and left. The guards took Shin back to his cell.
This procedure was repeated several times over the next three months. Every time Shin groveled. “If Choi Eun-Hee is alive, let me see her,” he told the Deputy Director once, “and we will work together for the Great Leader and the Dear Leader. We will work diligently.” “I tried to escape for my family,” he pleaded on another occasion, “but now I will sacrifice what is insignificant for the greater good. Give me a chance.” The lies came easier every time. He would have done anything to get out of that prison.
One day, after another of those absurd ersatz parole hearings, the doctor visited Shin and gave him Russian multivitamins. After that the vitamins came every day. They were another excuse for his jailers to linger around his cell.
“I heard that if you take these every day, you don’t get hungry,” one of the guards said one morning, holding one of the pills up to the light and studying it curiously.
“No, it’s just a dietary supplement,” Shin answered. “You still need to eat.”
“I heard someone say it, though…”
“People take a lot of vitamins in the South,” Shin said, steering the conversation where he knew it would head anyway.
“What?” The guard looked at him. “The officials, right?”
“No, no. They’re sold in pharmacies.”
“Anyone can buy them?”
“Of course,” Shin said.
The guard shook his head at the wonders of the South. Suddenly he punched the door to the cell next door and shouted at the prisoner inside. “Answer so I can understand you, you dog! You slime!” He laughed out loud.
“What’s that fellow in for?” Shin asked.
“An economic offense,” the jailer asked.
“There’s such a thing as an economic offense?”
The guard spat. “He’s a thief, understand?”
On April 9, five days after his youngest child’s third birthday and shortly after they started giving Shin vitamin pills, the warden came to fetch Shin and took him to an office, where a guard cut his hair into a military crew cut with a shaving razor. Then Shin was led to the employees’ bathroom and told to take a shower. The clothes he wore the day of his failed escape were returned to him. When he was washed and dressed the warden walked him to his office, where the Deputy Director and the fat man from his original interrogation sat waiting.
The Deputy Director nodded and the fat man stood. “Comrade,” he began, his guttural voice shaking, “you have destroyed state property and planned to escape from our country. You should be given the death penalty.” Shin stopped breathing. “However, we have decided to overlook your offenses this time, so you must work hard for the People and the state. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Shin answered, “yes!”
“Don’t forget the warmhearted generosity of the state,” the fat man warned.
“Thank you,” Shin agreed.
Another anonymous Mercedes waited outside. The Deputy Director walked alongside Shin as he stepped up to it. He hadn’t said a word to Shin since that first interrogation, three months ago. He looked thinner, Shin thought, as if he were undernourished; perhaps even like a man who had gone through some suffering. Maybe he had been punished for allowing Shin to escape. As Shin opened the car door the Deputy Director stared at him bitterly.
“You look like hell,” he snarled. “Just look at yourself.”
The Mercedes drove Shin back to the Chestnut Valley, this time to a house farther down the road, over the Taedong River and past a huge painted billboard showing a smiling, hardworking Kim Il-Sung instructing the local farmers. The new house was smaller and less luxurious than the last one. There were bars on every window, guard posts out front and in the back, and searchlights on every side.
As they entered, the Deputy Director chastised Shin for “causing so much pain” and told him he hoped he would stay out of trouble from now on. He sat Shin down and ordered him to write a letter of apology to Kim Jong-Il.
It took Shin three days to finish the letter to the Deputy Director’s satisfaction. Within a month, he had started to save food for another escape.