Escape from Camp 14

Prisoners grew their own corn and cabbage. As slave workers, they produced low-cost vegetables, fruit, farmed fish, pork, uniforms, cement, pottery and glassware for the crumbling economy outside the fence.

Shin and his mother were miserable and hungry during the famine, but no more than they were accustomed to. The boy carried on as before, hunting rats, filching his mother’s food and enduring her beatings.

2

The teacher sprang a surprise search. He rifled through Shin’s pockets and those of the forty other six- year-olds in his class.

When it was over, the teacher held five kernels of corn. They all belonged to a girl who was short, slight and, as Shin remembers, exceptionally pretty. He doesn’t recall the girl’s name, but everything else about that school day in June 1989 stands out in his memory.

The teacher was in a bad mood as he began searching pockets, and when he found corn he erupted.

‘You bitch, you stole corn? You want your hands cut off?’

He ordered the girl to the front of the class and told her to kneel. Swinging his long wooden pointer, he struck her on the head again and again. As Shin and his classmates watched in silence, lumps puffed up on her skull, blood leaked from her nose and she toppled over onto the concrete floor. Shin and several other classmates picked her up and carried her home to a pig farm not far from the school. Later that night, she died. Subsection three of Camp 14’s third rule said, ‘Anyone who steals or conceals any foodstuffs will be shot immediately.’

Shin had learned that teachers usually did not take this rule seriously. If they found food in a student’s pocket, they would sometimes deliver a couple of desultory whacks with a stick. More often they would do nothing. It was common for Shin and other students to take a chance. The pretty little girl was just unlucky, as Shin saw it.

He had been trained by guards and teachers to believe that every time he was beaten, he deserved it — because of the treasonous blood he had inherited from his parents. The girl was no different. Shin thought her punishment was just and fair, and he never became angry with his teacher for killing her. He believed his classmates felt the same way.

At school the next day, no mention was made of the beating. Nothing changed in the classroom. As far as Shin was aware, the teacher was not disciplined for his actions.

Shin spent all five years of primary school in class with this same teacher, who was in his early thirties, wore a uniform and carried a pistol in a holster on his hip. In breaks between classes, he allowed students to play ‘rock, paper, scissors’. On Saturdays, he would sometimes grant children an hour or two to pick lice out of each other’s hair. Shin never learned his name.

In grade school Shin was taught to stand up straight, bow to his teachers and never look them in the eye. At the start of school, he was given a black uniform: pants, shirt, an undershirt and a pair of shoes. They were replaced every two years, although they began to fall apart within a month or two.

Soap was sometimes distributed to students as a special reward for hard work. Shin did not distinguish himself with diligence and rarely touched soap. His pants were cardboard stiff from dirt and sweat. If he scraped his skin with a fingernail, grime flaked off. When it was too cold to bathe in the river or stand outside in the rain, Shin, his mother and classmates smelled like farm animals. Nearly everyone’s kneecaps turned black in winter from the dirt. Shin’s mother sewed him underwear and socks out of rags. After her death, he wore no underwear and struggled to find rags to wear inside his shoes.

School — a cluster of buildings readily viewed on satellite photographs — was about a seven-minute walk from Shin’s house. The windows were made of glass, not vinyl. That was the only frill. Like his mother’s house, Shin’s classroom was made of concrete. The teacher stood at a podium in front of a single blackboard. Boys and girls sat separately on either side of a centre aisle. Portraits of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il — the centrepieces of every classroom in North Korea — were nowhere to be found.

Instead, the school taught rudimentary literacy and numeracy, drilled children in camp rules and constantly reminded them of their iniquitous blood. Primary school students attended class six days a week. Secondary students attended seven days, with one day off a month.

‘You have to wash away the sins of your mothers and fathers, so work hard!’ the headmaster told them at assemblies.

The school day began promptly at eight with a session called chonghwa. It means total harmony, but it was an occasion for the teacher to criticize students for what they had done wrong the previous day. Attendance was checked twice daily. No matter how sick a student might be, absences were not allowed. Shin occasionally helped his classmates carry an ailing student to school. But he was rarely sick, other than with colds. He was inoculated just once, for smallpox.

Shin learned how to read and write the Korean alphabet, doing exercises on coarse paper made in the camp from corn husks. Each term, he was given one notebook with twenty-five pages. For a pencil, he often used a sharpened shaft of charred wood. He did not know of the existence of erasers. There were no reading exercises, as the teacher had the only book. For writing exercises, students were instructed to explain how they had failed to work hard and follow rules.

Shin learned to add and subtract, but not to multiply and divide. To this day, when he needs to multiply, he adds a column of numbers.

Physical education meant running around outside and playing on iron bars in the schoolyard. Sometimes students would go down to the river and gather snails for their teacher. There were no ball games. Shin saw a soccer ball for the first time when he was twenty-three, after fleeing to China.

The school’s long-term goals for students were implicit in what the teachers didn’t bother to teach. They told Shin that North Korea was an independent state and noted the existence of cars and trains. (This wasn’t much of a revelation, since Shin had seen guards drive cars and there was a train station in the southwest corner of the camp.) But teachers said nothing about North Korea’s geography, its neighbours, its history or its leaders. Shin had only a vague notion of who the Great Leader and the Dear Leader were.

Questions were not allowed in school. They angered teachers and triggered beatings. Teachers talked; students listened. By repetition in class, Shin mastered the alphabet and basic grammar. He learned how to pronounce words, but frequently had no idea what they meant. His teacher made him afraid, on an instinctive level, of trying to seek out new information.

Shin never came into contact with a classmate who had been born outside the camp. As far as he could tell, the school was reserved for children like him: the camp-bred spawn of reward marriages. He was told that children born elsewhere and brought into the camp with their parents were denied schooling and confined to the camp’s most remote sections, Valleys 4 and 5.

His teachers, as a result, could shape the minds and values of their students without contradiction from children who might know something of what existed beyond the fence.

There was no secret about what was in store for Shin and his classmates. Primary and secondary school trained them for hard labour. In the winter, children cleared snow, chopped down trees and shovelled coal for heating the school. The entire student body (about a thousand students) was mobilized to clean privies in the Bowiwon village where the guards lived, some of them with their wives and children. Shin and his classmates went from house to house chipping out frozen faeces with hoes and dumping the waste with their bare hands (there were no gloves for camp prisoners) on A-frame racks. They then dragged the excrement to the surrounding fields or carried it on their backs.

On warmer, happier days, after school ended in the afternoon, Shin’s class would sometimes march into the hills and mountains behind the school to collect food and herbs for their guards. Although it was against the rules, they often stuffed bracken, osmunda and other ferns inside their uniforms and brought them home to their mothers to make side dishes. They picked agaric mushrooms in April and pine mushrooms in October. On these long afternoon walks the children were allowed to talk to each other. Strict segregation between the sexes was relaxed as boys and girls worked, giggled and played alongside one another.

Shin began first grade with two other children from his village — a boy called Hong Sung Jo and a girl