In the middle of a night shift on the floor of the factory, Park alarmed Shin by bursting into song.
‘Hey! What do you think you are doing?’ Shin asked, fearing that a foreman might hear.
‘Singing,’ Park said.
‘Stop at once,’ Shin told him.
Shin had never sung a song. His only exposure to music had been on the farm, when trucks with loudspeakers played military marching music while prisoners picked weeds. To Shin, singing seemed unnatural and insanely risky.
‘Would you like to sing with me?’ Park asked.
Shin vigorously shook his head and waved his hands, trying to silence Park.
‘Who would hear me at this hour?’ Park said. ‘Sing after me this once.’
Shin refused.
Park asked why he was so afraid of a little song when he was willing to hear seditious stories about how Kim Jong Il was a thief and North Korea was a hellhole?
Shin explained that he tolerated such things because Park had the good sense to whisper. ‘I wish you wouldn’t sing,’ Shin said.
Park agreed not to. But a few nights later, he again broke into song and offered to teach Shin the lyrics. Although dubious and afraid, Shin listened and sang with Park, but quietly.
The lyrics of ‘Song of the Winter Solstice’, which recent defectors say is the theme song of a popular programme on North Korean state television, are about travelling companions who endure hardship and pain.
As we all walk down life’s long, long road,
We will remain warm travelling companions, standing against the lashes of wind and rain.
Along that road there will be happiness and suffering.
We will overcome; we will endure all of life’s tempests.
It is still the only song Shin knows.
In November, not long after Park was assigned to the textile factory, four Bowiwon guards paid a surprise visit to the prisoners’ nightly meeting of self-criticism. Two of them were unfamiliar faces and Shin believed they were from outside the camp.
As the meeting ended, the chief guard said he wanted to talk about lice, a chronic problem in the camps. He asked prisoners to step forward if they were infested.
A man and a woman who were leaders in their respective dormitory rooms stood. They said lice were out of control in their quarters. Guards gave each of them a bucket filled with a cloudy liquid that smelled, to Shin, like agricultural chemicals.
To demonstrate its effectiveness in controlling lice, the guards asked five men and five women in each of the infested dorm rooms to wash themselves with the cloudy liquid. Shin and Park, of course, had lice, but they were not given an opportunity to use the treatment.
In about a week, all ten prisoners who had washed with the liquid developed boils on their skin. After several weeks, their skin began to putrefy and flake off. They had high fevers that kept them from working. Shin saw a truck arrive at the factory and watched as the ailing prisoners were loaded into it. He never saw them again.
It was then, in mid-December 2004, that Shin decided he had had enough and began thinking about escape.
Park made those thoughts possible. He changed the way Shin connected with other people. Their friendship broke a lifelong pattern, stretching back to Shin’s malignant relationship with his mother, of wariness and betrayal.
Shin was no longer a creature of his captors. He believed he had found someone to help him survive.
Their relationship echoed, in many ways, the bonds of trust and mutual protection that kept prisoners alive and sane in Nazi concentration camps. In those camps, researchers found, the ‘basic unit of survival’ was the pair, not the individual.
‘[I]t was in the pairs that the prisoners kept alive the semblance of humanity,’ concluded Elmer Luchterhand, a sociologist at Yale who interviewed fifty-two concentration camp survivors shortly after liberation.[17]
Pairs stole food and clothing for each other, exchanged small gifts and planned for the future. If one member of a pair fainted from hunger in front of an SS officer, the other would prop him up.
‘Survival… could only be a social achievement, not an individual accident,’ wrote Eugene Weinstock, a Belgian resistance fighter and Hungarian-born Jew who was sent to Buchenwald in 1943.[18]
Finally the death of one member of a pair often doomed the other. Women who knew Anne Frank in the Bergen-Belsen camp said that neither hunger nor typhus killed the young girl who would become the most famous diarist of the Nazi era. Rather, they said, she lost the will to live after the death of her sister, Margot.[19]
Like Nazi concentration camps, labour camps in North Korea use confinement, hunger and fear to create a kind of Skinner box:[20] a closed, closely regulated chamber in which guards assert absolute control over prisoners.[21] Yet while Auschwitz existed for only three years, Camp 14 is a fifty-year-old Skinner box, an ongoing longitudinal experiment in repression and mind control in which guards breed prisoners whom they control, isolate and pit against each other from birth.
The miracle of Shin’s friendship with Park is how quickly it blew up the box.
Park’s spirit, his dignity and his incendiary information gave Shin something that was both enthralling and unbearable: a context, a way to dream about the future.
He suddenly understood where he was and what he was missing.
Camp 14 was no longer home; it was an abhorrent cage.
And Shin now had a well-travelled, broad-shouldered friend to help him get out.
PART TWO
14
Their plan was simple — and insanely optimistic.
Shin knew the camp. Park knew the world. Shin would get them over the fence. Park would lead them to China, where his uncle would give them shelter, money and assistance in travelling on to South Korea.
Shin was the first to suggest that they escape together. But before he broached the idea, he fretted for days, fearing that Park might be an informer, that he was being set up and that he would be executed like his mother and brother. Even after Park embraced the idea, Shin’s paranoia was difficult to shake: he had sold out his own mother; why shouldn’t Park sell him out?
Still, the escape plan, such as it was, went forward. Shin’s excitement overcame his fear. He would wake up in high spirits after a night of dreaming about grilled meat. Carrying sewing machines up and down factory stairs no longer wore him out. For the first time in his life, Shin had something to look forward to.
Since Park was under orders to follow Shin around, every working day became a marathon session of whispered escape preparations and motivational stories about the fine dining awaiting them in China. They decided that if guards discovered them at the fence, Park would take them out using tae kwon do. Although the guards carried automatic weapons, Shin and Park persuaded each other that their chances of not getting killed were good.
By any measure, these expectations were absurd. Just two people other than Shin are known to have
