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
