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
