escaped from any political prison camp in North Korea and made it to the West. One is Kim Yong, the former lieutenant colonel who had highly placed friends across North Korea. But he did not go over the fence. He escaped because of what he described as a ‘totally miraculous chance’. In 1999, during the government breakdown and the security lapses that marked the height of the North Korean famine, Kim hid under a metal panel wedged into the bottom of a dilapidated train car, which was being loaded with coal. When the train rolled out of Camp 18, so did Kim, who knew the countryside well and used his personal contacts at the border to find a safe way to cross into China.
Kim fled a prison that was not nearly as well guarded as the one where Shin and Park were planning their escape. As Kim wrote in his memoir,
The other escapee is Kim Hye Sook, who also fled Camp 18. Along with her family, she was first imprisoned in the camp in 1975, at the age of thirteen. Authorities released her in 2001, but later sent her back to the same camp. She then escaped, and in 2009 found her way out of North Korea to South Korea, via China, Laos and Thailand.
Shin and Park were unaware of Kim’s escape, and they had no way to gauge the odds of getting out of Camp 14 or of finding safe passage to China. But Park was inclined to believe the radio broadcasts from Seoul, which he had heard while living in China and which focused on the failures and weaknesses of the North Korean government. Park told Shin that the United Nations had begun to criticize human rights violations inside the North’s political labour camps. He also said he had heard that the camps would disappear in the not too distant future.[23]
Although Park was well-travelled in North Korea and China, he confided to Shin that he knew little about the steep, snowy, thinly populated mountains outside the fence. Nor did he know much about the roads that could lead them safely to China.
Shin knew the layout of the camp from countless days of gathering wood and collecting acorns, but he knew nothing about how to get over or through the high-voltage fence surrounding the camp.
He also found it difficult, during the weeks and days before the escape, to avoid thoughts of what had happened to his mother and brother. It wasn’t guilt he felt. It was fear. He feared he would die as they had. His mind flashed to images of their executions. He imagined standing in front of a firing squad or on a wooden box with a noose around his neck.
Making a calculation that was short on information and long on aspiration, Shin told himself he had a ninety per cent chance of getting through the fence and a ten per cent chance of getting shot.
Shin’s primary pre-escape preparation was to steal warm clothes and new shoes from a fellow prisoner.
That prisoner slept on the same dormitory floor and worked in the factory as a garment cutter, a job that allowed him to accumulate scraps of fabric, which he traded for food and other goods. He was also meticulous about his clothes. Unlike anyone else in the camp, the cutter had assembled a complete extra set of winter clothing and shoes.
Shin had never stolen clothing from another prisoner, but since he had stopped snitching, he’d become increasingly intolerant of prisoners who continued to inform on their neighbours. He particularly disliked the cutter, who reported on everyone who stole food from the factory garden. Shin thought he deserved to be robbed.
Since prisoners did not have access to lockers or any other way of securing their belongings, it was a simple matter for Shin to wait for the cutter to leave the dormitory room, take his belongings and hide them until the escape. The cutter did not suspect Shin when the clothes went missing. The stolen shoes did not fit Shin’s feet (shoes in the camp almost never did), but they were relatively new.
Clothing in the camp was only distributed every six months. By late December, when Shin and Park were planning their escape, Shin’s winter-season pants had holes in the knees and in the seat. When it came time to run, he decided that for warmth he would nevertheless wear his old clothes beneath his stolen clothes. He did not have a coat, hat, or gloves to protect him from the bitter cold.
Planning to escape meant waiting for a work detail that would get Shin and Park out of the factory and give them an excuse to be near the fence.
Their chance came on New Year’s Day, a rare holiday when machines in the factory went silent for two days. Shin learned in late December that on 2 January, the second day of the closure, his crew of sewing-machine repairmen and some of the seamstresses would leave the factory and be escorted to a mountain ridge on the eastern edge of the camp. There, they would spend the day trimming trees and stacking wood.
Shin had worked on that mountain before. It was near the fence that ran along the top of the ridge. Apprised of all this, Park agreed they would escape on 2 January 2005.
When the factory shut down on 1 January, Shin decided, with some reluctance, to pay a final visit to his father.
Their relationship, always distant, had grown colder still. Shin, on the few days when he did not have to work on the farm or in the factory, had rarely taken advantage of camp rules that allowed him to visit. Spending time with his father had become an ordeal.
What made Shin so angry with his father was not clear, at least not to Shin. It was his mother, not his father, who had put his life at risk by plotting an escape when he was thirteen. She and Shin’s brother were the ones who had been complicit in starting a chain of events that resulted in his arrest, torture and abuse from other students in secondary school. His father had been another victim.
But his father was alive and attempting a reconciliation with Shin. By the unforgiving calculus of relations between distant fathers and resentful sons, that was reason enough for Shin’s loathing.
They shared a sullen New Year’s supper in a cafeteria at his father’s work site, eating cornmeal and cabbage soup. Shin made no reference to his escape plan. He had told himself, as he walked to see his father, that any show of emotions, any hint of final leave-taking, could imperil the escape. He did not completely trust him.
His father had tried, after the killing of his wife and eldest son, to be more attentive. He had apologized for being a bad parent and for having exposed the boy to the camp’s savagery. He had even encouraged his son, if he ever got the chance, to ‘see what the world is like’. That lukewarm escape endorsement may have been blandly worded because Shin’s father did not completely trust his son either.
After Shin was assigned to the garment factory, where opportunities to find or steal extra food were particularly meagre, his father had gone to the extraordinary trouble of obtaining some rice flour and sending it to his son as a paternal offering.
When they sat together in the cafeteria, neither mentioned the gift, and when Shin left that evening, there was no special goodbye. He expected that when the guards learned of his escape, they would come for his father and take him back to the underground prison. He was almost certain that his father did not know what was coming.
15
Early the next morning, a foreman from the garment factory herded Shin, Park and about twenty-five other prisoners up the mountain. They set to work near the top of a twelve-hundred-foot slope. The sky was clear and the sun shone brightly on a heavy snow pack, but it was cold and the wind was blowing. Some prisoners used small axes to hack the branches off logged trees, while others stacked wood.
The firewood detail was an extraordinary stroke of good luck as it placed Shin and Park within a stone’s throw of the fence that ran along the spine of the mountain. On the far side of that fence, the terrain canted steeply down, but it was not too steep to be traversed by foot. Not far beyond the fence there was tree cover.
A guard tower rose from the fence line about a quarter of a mile to the north of where the prisoners chopped wood. Guards walking two abreast patrolled the inside perimeter of the fence. Shin noticed lengthy
