TWENTY

BY OUR SECOND week, a workday routine has been established. In the morning, we saunter down to one of the hotel’s three restaurants for a breakfast of toast, eggs, and instant coffee—though we are also free to help ourselves to the more elaborate buffet intended for Chinese guests, replete with sliced bean curd, cucumbers, rice, and porridge. Then down to the lobby, meeting Roe and a constantly late Min for the crosstown commute to Kim Hyong Jik University for two hours of lessons. Afternoons are more eclectic, centered on a list of activities and excursions that Alexandre and I agreed upon with Alek. Given the duration of our stay, some afternoons sightseeing is sidelined by more mundane quotidian tasks, like shopping and laundry. We are kept so busy that we have little time at night for homework. As slow as the time seems to pass here, we are left each night to wonder where it has all gone.

Given Alek’s long-term business interests and acquaintanceship with Min and Comrade Kim, who joins us for dinner every few days, we are made to feel less like tourists, more like illustrious guests with a private chauffeur. The longer we stay, the more at home we feel in this strange place; the less strange it feels. At lunch, we slurp our cold noodles and chat with Min and Roe with a relaxed air of conviviality, punctuated by eruptions of laughter. By contrast, on those occasions when other foreign tour groups will appear in the restaurant, their guides and drivers nearly always sit at a separate table, seeming bored with their charges.

Weekends, we usually take day trips outside of Pyongyang. Today’s Saturday, so we’ll take a drive out to neighboring South Hwanghae Province, which occupies the southwestern corner of the country. Our first stop: rural Sinchon county. Home of the Sinchon Museum of American War Atrocities.

I’ve been wanting to visit the museum for years, but it is rarely put on group itineraries. It’s considered one of the more “sensitive” sites, a polite way of saying that its contents are actually rather incendiary. The Sinchon Museum is intended more for domestic rather than international propaganda purposes; virtually every North Korean visits the museum at least once, on mandatory educational pilgrimages.

After the three-hour ride along the potholed highway through depressed bucolica, our van pulls into the empty parking lot.

“You know what kind of place this is, right?” Min asks, a hint of warning in her voice, as we climb out of our metallic, air-conditioned box on wheels.

Elevated on a royal slope above the parking lot, the museum glistens beneath the scorching late July sun. The guide, in yellow joseon-ot, is already making her way down the sidewalk toward us. Above the entrance, a large propaganda slogan has been inscribed in gold lettering. Alek teasingly asks if my Korean is good enough yet to read it. His is: “Do not forget the lesson of blood on the ground of Sinchon.” After we exchange greetings with the guide, our tour commences as we make our way up the hill.

Halfway up, we pause before two elevated mounds, familiar to anyone who has visited a Koryo Dynasty–era imperial tomb, such as that of King Kongmin outside of Kaesong. These, however, are not the tombs of an emperor and his wife; one, we are told, contains the remains of one hundred women who died in the slaughter that took place here, the other the remains of one hundred children. To the left of the museum building stand two warehouses, so nondescript that I hadn’t noticed them a moment before. These, we are told, are the buildings in which the victims were murdered by the American capitalists.

The museum opened just five years after the Korean War armistice, on March 26, 1958. It was rebuilt in 2015 on the orders of Kim Jong Un, who instructed that it be made “more comfortable” for Korean visitors. Previously, the museum space was located at a greater distance from the warehouses where the victims had been killed; now, they were located side-by-side, presumably to strengthen the dramatic impact of the horrors contained in each of the buildings.

At the time the war broke out, Sinchon was a regional transportation hub and, therefore, a strategic point militarily. To get to Pyongyang or Haeju, the provincial capital, you had to pass through. In the early days of the Korean War, the town was captured by the US military. For the fifty-two days they occupied the area—from October 17 to December 7, 1950, when they were driven out by the advancing Chinese troops—they committed numerous mass murders and atrocities, aimed chiefly at local civilians, that amounted to nothing less than a total holocaust. At least this is the story the museum is here to tell. It has been erected on the locale where many of these crimes against humanity allegedly took place.

The museum is not merely a commemorative site but a vivid, stomach-churning evocation—replete with wax dummies, fake blood, and a piped-in soundscape of screaming children—of the savage butchery and malicious nature that signify American imperialism.

We proceed along a chronology of brutality. The US soldiers launched their adventure, our guide relays, by gathering nine hundred local residents into an air raid shelter. Through the air ducts, they poured gasoline and then incinerated the victims. “All of them were innocent civilians. Mostly women and children,” she somberly intones.

This was followed by the massacre of October 20, when five hundred twenty people were placed inside yet another air raid shelter, in which the devious Americans had planted dynamite. They locked the doors and detonated it. Our guide takes great relish in elucidating all the gory details. Min takes less delight in interpreting, rendering the English translation in an affectless monotone of a description of human flesh left hanging from the walls of the shelter.

I’m reminded of Eden Eden Eden, Pierre Guyotat’s anti-novel, with its overwrought and crude incantations of sadistic violence, rape, and mass murder, meant to evoke the horrors of the Algerian War. Indeed, with its lack of historical contextualization and refutation of any causal factors that might bolster the verisimilitude of what is displayed—even the blurred black-and-white photographic documentation looks abstract, as though it could have been pulled from any number of the past century’s mass slaughters—the museum, like Guyotat’s book, is a collection of fragments of violence; both works are essentially pornographic.

The action shifts to a nearby hot springs resort, commandeered by US soldiers as a barracks. There, our guide explains, they dragged local women, raped them, and then threw them into the hot springs and tossed in grenades to “cover up” their crimes.

Becoming animated, the museum guide bemoans “these American lunatics, who tortured women by cutting off their breasts and inserting sticks in their vaginas.” She nearly spits on the floor. “And these Americans preach about ‘human rights’! And boast that they enjoy the utmost of civilizations!”

When not busy raping and murdering women at the hot springs, the soldiers were occupied with the project of slaughtering an additional twelve hundred locals. This they accomplished with the help of vicious attack dogs. Or by burning them to death. It is not specified whether these two methods were employed simultaneously or alternately; it is fruitless to ask, as rationality does not play much of a role in this type of narrative construction.

Twelve miles north of Sinchon, a bridge was barricaded by the US army. Every civilian approaching that day hoping to cross was instead murdered.

At another bridge, the soldiers took sadistic pleasure in tying sacks filled with rocks to the feet of local peasants and tossing them off to drown in the deep river below. The few who were lucky enough to survive and managed to swim up to the surface didn’t meet a happy end; they were shot at by the evil Yankees above to ensure not a single survivor was left.

These scenes are enacted by lifelike mannequins—ugly American soldiers with hooked noses (one can’t help but think of the depiction of Jews in Nazi Germany propaganda) and malevolent grins. Others are illustrated in large, mural-esque wall paintings. Over speakers, a soundtrack of screaming children and symphonic music. Piles of bodies forming mass graves in grainy photographs. Every few years, a new mass grave will be discovered in the vicinity, necessitating the museum’s constant expansion.

“Some of the skeletons unearthed were scratching the ground, trying to climb to the surface as they suffocated. In one of these mass graves, they found the remains of a nine-month-old fetus in one of the bodies,” says the guide. “So you can tell these Americans even killed pregnant women!”

I wonder what’s going through Min’s mind as she’s forced to interpret. Whether she believes all these things, whether she is sickened by them. What kind of detachment her flat, emotionless transcription is rooted in. Surely she has a different relationship to history, to the “history” that is so key in fomenting North Korean national identity, having grown up thousands of miles away.

Alek and Alexandre and I are careful to remain silent, even avoid glancing at one another, throughout the tour. In the past, it has not been unheard-of for tourists to react in anger, even argue with the museum guides, over the veracity of such outlandish claims. This is why tourists are rarely brought here. It is something that has to be requested.

Alek breaks protocol to point out a detail in a particularly gruesome, corpse-strewn photo and begins to whisper something in my ear. Min uncharacteristically reacts in anger, halting her hate-speech translation to remind us “It was you who wanted to come here” before huffing off to the next room. Later, when she notices me filming her on my phone as she is interpreting, she asks me to stop.

Understatement has never been considered a virtue in the North Korean propaganda machinery. Overwhelmed by disbelief, I ask the guide to clarify whether all of these crimes actually took place here in Sinchon or if this museum is meant to commemorate atrocities that had taken place throughout Korea during the war.

“The museum documents only the crimes that took place here,” she responds, before quickly adding, “though more atrocities were committed all over Korea.”

Of course.

We are led into yet another room with the sound of screaming children at full blast.

“Are schoolchildren also brought to this museum?” I am inspired to ask.

“Yes,” replies the guide proudly. “And after seeing the exhibition, the children say, ‘The US imperialists are not human. They are wolves.’”

In the hallway, we pass by a large propaganda banner. Alek translates: “Don’t forget the US imperialist wolves.”

As November 1950 drew to a close, the American imperialist wolves realized that the sheep had outnumbered them. They would have to flee as soon as possible, but before they did, they committed a final genocide. To “stop the seeds of communism from growing,” they gathered up as many women and children as they could find, separated them in two storehouses, poured in gasoline, and burned them alive. Only three children survived; one, we are told, now works here at the museum. But they were not left orphaned despite the tragedy; they had their new father, the State, the Great Leader Kim Il Sung, to look after them.

As we move on in the display, the exhibition segues from scenes of mass brutality to showcasing acts of barbarity carried out against individuals. In a mannequinized reenactment, a female resistance leader is held down by one US soldier while another drives a nail into her skull. The guide comments, “You can see the atrociousness of the American imperialists, who enjoyed torturing and killing people in an atrocious way while they were here.”

A young adolescent, the leader of the communist student union, was murdered “for being a model student,” among other transgressions. A “model hero worker” met his end by being torn apart, with each side of his limbs tied to separate oxcarts run in opposite directions. The principal of an elementary school had his head chopped off with a hatchet. Another woman was tied to a tree, had her breasts cut off, and was then burned to death. “It’s the exact same way they treated the Indians,” our guide notes.

“The United States is still carrying out war exercises in an attempt to invade our country,” she continues. Then, with the open-handed gesture with which you are permitted to acknowledge a portrait of one of the leaders—pointing is forbidden—the guide draws our attention to a large photograph of Kim Jong Un, whose wise leadership will prevent that from ever happening.

Nearing the end of the exhibitions, the guide’s delivery rises to an emotional peak, her voice quivering wildly:

“We Korean people won’t forget the crimes that these animal-like people committed on our land. We will make them pay for all the blood they spilled.”

Outside, we make our way down the sidewalk toward the two warehouses. Perched on a hill, we are afforded a glimpse over the town of Sinchon. I attempt to take a photograph of the townscape, but a plainclothes male guard suddenly approaches and demands I lower my camera.

The first storehouse is a replica of the one in which the original genocide-by-fire was alleged to have taken place. Inside, the guide points to air ducts in the ceiling where the gasoline was poured in. The second building is one of the actual warehouses where the children were burned alive. An elderly gentleman with jet-black hair in a khaki worker’s uniform appears. I’ve never seen anyone with dyed hair in North Korea before, but it’s hard for me to believe that someone could make it to that age without a single sprout of gray. Especially considering what he is alleged to have experienced. He is, we are told, one of the three children who survived that day. His speech further embellishes the wickedness committed by the American devils. They passed out cups of water and encouraged the children to drink, he tells us—but the water turned out to be gasoline. Luckily, he was situated in one of the far corners of the storeroom and passed out early “because of the cold,” so his life was spared. “The Americans,” he says, “are animals wearing the masks of human beings. Even though time has passed, the flames of anger still burn in my heart.”

As we exit the storehouse, a group of about two dozen workers is outside—a factory work unit on an educational field excursion—patiently waiting for us to finish so that they might have their turn. “I wonder what they’re thinking after seeing all that and now having to look at us,” whispers Alexandre.

I thought that would be the last of it. But then, there is a third storehouse, home of yet another burning atrocity, but by now, I am so emotionally exhausted by the content and overwhelmed with the theatricality of the staging that I have lost track of the narrative. Min points to a piece of graffiti that was scratched into the wall “at the last moment”: “Long live the Workers’ Party of Korea!” wrote the dying martyr.

Before bidding us adieu, the museum guide makes her conclusive speech. “Please go back to your countries and spread word of the terrible atrocities suffered by our people. The Koreans never wanted a war. We are the most peace-loving people in the entire world.” Then, without a pause: “We will never forget what the American imperialists did to us; one day, we will have our revenge.”