“I’ve decided to live in North Korea for good,” Shin told the Deputy Director. “Maybe I could tell you about my life, and you could give me some advice.”
He settled into his ideological studies with all the fervor he could muster. He read the three volumes of The History of Kim Il-Sung’s Anti-Japanese Struggle, wrote the most ingratiating book report the screenwriter in him could write, and even memorized long passages to impress his instructor. They watched two North Korean movies a day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. When Kim Il-Sung’s birthday came around on April 16, Shin joined in the champagne toasts, even though he usually didn’t drink. “I quaffed [my first drink] in a single gulp and asked for another glass,” he recalled. “Then I made a toast, too. ‘I wish our beloved Great Leader Kim Il-Sung long life and prosperity!’”
Vigilance at the house had been stepped up. Shin’s bedroom was located on the upper floor, with the other rooms on the same level arranged so that his room was visible from each, allowing them to monitor his comings and goings. Downstairs had the usual living room–cum–projection room, a dining room, and a third bedroom for another live-in attendant. Two guards lived with Shin. He was told they were his “cook and receptionist.” The Deputy Director, who had slept in the same house as him in the Chestnut Valley, now stayed elsewhere and only came by to give Shin his lessons. Shin wasn’t allowed out of the house, not even in the backyard, unless the Deputy Director was with him. All windows except one in the dining room were literally nailed shut. At night when everyone was asleep a ferocious dog was let loose on the grounds.
April turned into May, May into June, and suddenly it was July. It was hot and muggy, the flowers and plants outside the house a dazzling array of colors. All day the air throbbed with the thick hum of locusts. Locked away indoors, Shin collected everything he came across—scraps of food, salt, matches—in an improvisational frenzy, without taking time to think what purpose they might serve. “I knew this would be my last chance,” he said. “If I was caught, I would be killed.”
* * *
The hours crawled by, the days filled with “anxiety, planning, and waiting for my chance,” Shin recalled. Almost every night thunderstorms broke the sweltering heat. The bellows of the thunder and the sound of the heavy rain smothered the other noises in the house, and the guards gave up their patrols and huddled under shelter. Even then Shin couldn’t get past the guard dog, but he didn’t plan to. His scheme was both simpler and more daring than his last.
On one such stormy July night, he crept into the upstairs guest room, where he had noticed that the three radiators were on wheels, and that if one was moved, a panel in the wall behind could also be moved, revealing a small empty space in the wall itself, just big enough for a man to hide in. He pushed aside the radiator in question, removed the panel, and slipped into the space, carefully replacing the panel behind him. From its position behind a desk, the radiator made it difficult to notice any alteration to the panel.
Shin crouched within the wall, his pockets stuffed with food and supplies he had amassed over the previous weeks. He expected he might have to stay in hiding for three or four days—without stretching his legs or relieving himself in any way—while his captors, thinking he had escaped, set out on a massive manhunt. “Later, when the furor died down,” Shin wrote, “I would leave the house and head toward one of the ports, or the border, and eventually make my way to the Soviet Union.”
When dinner was served that night and Shin Sang-Ok could not be found, pandemonium broke out. Within a couple of hours officers had arrived to search every corner of the house—but instead of then deserting the property entirely, as Shin had expected, they set up their search headquarters in the study, right across the hall from the room in which he was hiding. Shin was stunned. He had assumed his captors would behave the way he planned—according to the script he had written in his mind—when they found his room empty. Even from his hopeless position Shin still believed he could plan a scene and direct it to his intention.
Lying scrunched up inside the wall, his back already aching and his throat tight with thirst, Shin listened anxiously as cars screeched to a halt outside the house and men stomped in and out of every room. Walkie-talkies crackled loudly. He heard some of the men knocking on the ceilings and walls to determine if they were hollow. “I could hear men on the roof,” Shin wrote later. “My bedroom and the study became the search headquarters. People were coming and going; orders were given and reports delivered in these rooms. There were drivers in the room I was hiding in. They came by to listen to the radio.” At three in the morning, bursting to pee, Shin crept to the bathroom and relieved himself, waiting for the dogs to bark or the thunder to crack before flushing the toilet.
On the third day of Shin’s concealment an attendant entered the guest room to clean it. As he approached the desk he saw that the radiator had been moved and that the panel behind it was slightly open; in fact, he could see part of Shin’s body. He shouted immediately. “He’s here! He’s here! The gentleman is hiding in the aide’s room!”
Moments later, policemen rushed in. A man in his thirties, wearing a gray Mao tunic rather than a police uniform, seemed to be in charge. Once Shin had been dragged out of his hole the man in the Mao tunic sat him down and began inquiring, politely:
“Why try to escape again?” he asked. “Why cause so much trouble again?”
“Because I can’t live here,” Shin replied. “I don’t have my wife, my kids, and my family. My friends. They are all in the South. How can I live here all by myself?”
“But you never requested for your family to be brought to you,” the man said, shrugging. “If you had just asked, it would have been arranged.”
“How could you bring my family from the South? The government is probably watching them very carefully.”
“Why can’t you ever believe in the power of the People? You just don’t understand the power of the People…” The man sighed. “You’ve committed an offense and betrayed the state by trying to escape from this country. These are serious offenses. You deserve to be executed.”
“I’m a South Korean. What crime is it for me to try to go back?”
“You are a citizen here. Citizens here must obey the law of the land.”
“I’m not a citizen here,” Shin protested, “I’m still a South Korean—”
“Ha—nonsense. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is the true government of the Korean peninsula and therefore, you are a citizen of North Korea.”
That was the end of the conversation. Other senior officials came by to take a look at Shin, later discussing his case in one of the downstairs rooms. The Deputy Director appeared as well, “looking at me with the eyes of a viper,” Shin observed, before being asked to leave. When, eventually, Shin was taken down for dinner, he was served a prisoner’s meal consisting of salt soup, a tiny handful of rice, and no meat. More guards and dogs were brought in, and by the next morning barbed wire had been installed outside every window.
With his spirit destroyed, Shin now slipped into limbo, waiting to be taken away any minute to be executed. Both times he had tried to escape he had genuinely believed he would succeed. “My escapes were like those in a movie,” he reflected years later. “Perhaps I had confused fantasy with reality.… But without at least attempting to escape, I could never have endured the anxiety, the loneliness, and the fear. In such a stark reality, with so much free time, it was only natural that my fantasies and dreams started to merge into reality.” Twenty days after Shin’s hiding place was found, two security officers came to the house and said they were there to take the prisoner “to a place where you will pay for your crime.” They are finally going to kill me, Shin thought as he climbed, handcuffed, in the back of yet another Mercedes, his belongings thrown in the trunk.
They didn’t kill him. The Mercedes drove for three hours, in the dark, into the heart of nowhere, and deposited him in front of a fortified building.
Shin had arrived at Prison Number 6.
* * *
The detention center had been one thing. Prison Number Six, the “enlightenment center,” was another.
The Venezuelan poet Ali Lameda, who traveled to Pyongyang to translate the collected works of Kim Il-Sung into Spanish, was arrested and convicted in 1968—on no explicit charges and with no evidence—and then spent six years in Prison Number 6, which he knew as Suriwon Prison, after the nearest town. He wrote, “The conditions of the prison were appalling. No change of clothes in years, nor of food plates.… There are no rights for the prisoner, no visits, parcels or cigarettes or food or opportunity to read a book or newspaper, or write.… Hunger was used as a control.… In my opinion, it is preferable to be beaten, as it is possible to grit one’s teeth and withstand physical beating. To be continuously starving is worse.” A guard told him six thousand or more men and women were held in the prison, “a huge circular place with an enormous courtyard,” at any one time. Lameda could hear some of them wailing in other cells, and added grimly, “You can soon learn to distinguish whether a man is crying from fear, or pain or from madness, in such a place.”
It was here that Shin Sang-Ok was banished after his second escape attempt. Formally indicted and convicted, he was made to change into prison garb—cotton, secondhand, and unwashed from the previous “renter”—and taken to the small, damp, filthy cell that would be his new home. He had to crawl into it through a flap on his hands and knees. Cockroaches swarmed the toilet bowl.
As he quickly learned, prison policy forbade him from meeting or exchanging words with other inmates. Chatter, laughter, and singing were forbidden. Prisoners were allowed to wash their clothes but not themselves. The weekly bodily and cavity search was administered more like a ritual humiliation. Even when the prisoners sunned themselves in the yard they were kept in individual wire cages, like in a zoo, with cement sides so they couldn’t speak to or look at one another. The food was little more than “grass and salt” in water, with the odd ball of rice.
Along with his fellow inmates, Shin was instructed to sit in his cell in a cross-legged position, head down—and not to move again. The slightest flicker of a muscle was met with a beating, the prisoner most commonly being asked to put his hands through the bars on the door and having his fingers smashed violently with a guard’s baton. Defector Hyok Kang, whose father underwent the same treatment, wrote of it, “The prisoners took up their cross-legged position … and had to remain silent and motionless. This was real torture, because while the lice ate you up, all you could do was watch them go about it, since the slightest movement was punished.… My father still bears the marks. Only once a day, the prisoners enjoyed a break during which they were allowed to move. It lasted ten minutes. The prisoners, whose legs were often swollen and puffy, because their blood circulation stopped almost completely in that cross-legged position, could barely get to their feet.” (“The prisoner[s] sat for sixteen hours a day looking at the wardens and the prison bars,” Lameda added. “Prisoners must stay awake throughout the day, the official explanation went, since how could a prisoner continually ponder his guilt if he slept?”)
This was called the torture position. It was to be Shin’s daily regime for over two and a half years.