Eating rats not only filled empty stomachs, it was essential to survival. Their flesh could help prevent pellagra, a sometimes fatal disease that was rampant in the camp, especially in the winter. Prisoners with pellagra, the result of a lack of protein and niacin in their diets, suffered weakness, skin lesions, diarrhoea and dementia. It was a frequent cause of death.
Catching and roasting rats became a passion for Shin. He caught them in his house, in the fields and in the privy. He would meet his friends in the evening at his primary school, where there was a coal grill to roast them. Shin peeled away their skin, scraped away their innards, salted what was left and chewed the rest – flesh, bones and tiny feet.
He also learned to use the stems of foxtail grass to spear grasshoppers, longheaded locusts and dragonflies, which he roasted over a fire in late summer and autumn. In the mountain forests, where groups of students were often sent to gather wood, Shin ate wild grapes, gooseberries and Korean raspberries by the fistful.
During winter, spring and early summer, there was much less to eat. Hunger drove him and his boyhood friends to try strategies that older prisoners in the camp claimed could ease the discomfort of an empty stomach. They ate meals without water or soup, under the theory that liquid accelerated digestion and quickened the return of hunger pangs. They also tried to refrain from defecating, believing that this would make them feel full and less obsessed with food. An alternative hunger-fighting technique was to imitate cows, regurgitating a recent meal and eating it again. Shin tried this a few times, but found it didn’t ease his hunger.
The summertime, when children were sent to the fields to help plant and weed, was peak season for rats and field mice. Shin remembers eating them every day. His happiest, most contented childhood moments were when his belly was full.
The ‘eating problem’, as it’s often called in North Korea, is not confined to labour camps. It has stunted the bodies of millions across the country. Teenage boys fleeing the North in the past decade are on average five inches shorter and weigh twenty-five pounds less than boys growing up in South Korea.1
Mental retardation caused by early childhood malnutrition disqualifies about a quarter of potential military conscripts in North Korea, according to the National Intelligence Council, a research institution that is part of the US intelligence community. Its report said hunger-caused intellectual disabilities among the young were likely to cripple economic growth even if the country opened to the outside world or united with the South.
Since the 1990s, North Korea has been unable to grow, buy or deliver enough food to feed its population. Famine in the mid-1990s killed perhaps a million North Koreans. A similar death rate in the United States would claim about twelve million lives.
The North’s food disaster eased in the late 1990s as the government agreed to receive international food aid. The United States became North Korea’s largest aid donor while remaining its most demonized enemy.
Every year North Korea needs to produce more than five million tons of rice and cereal grain to feed its twenty-three million people. Nearly every year it falls short, usually by about a million tons. With long winters and high mountains, the country lacks arable land, denies incentives to farmers and cannot afford fuel or modern farm equipment.
It squeaked by for years without a food catastrophe thanks to subsidies from Moscow, but when the Soviet Union collapsed, the subsidies ended and North Korea’s centrally planned economy stopped functioning. There was no free fuel for its aging factories, no guaranteed market for its often-shoddy goods and no access to cheap, Soviet-made chemical fertilizers on which state farms had become dependent.
For several years, South Korea helped fill the gap, giving Pyongyang half a million tons of fertilizer annually as part of its ‘Sunshine Policy’ to try to ease North–South tensions.
When new leadership in Seoul cut off the free fertilizer in 2008, North Korea tried to do nationally what it has been doing for decades in its labour camps. The masses were told to make toibee, a fertilizer in which ash is mixed with human excrement. In recent winters, frozen human waste has been chipped out of public toilets in cities and towns across the country. Factories, public enterprises and neighbourhoods have been ordered to produce two tons of toibee, according to Good Friends, a Buddhist charity with informants in North Korea. In the spring, it was dried in the open air before being transported to state farms. But organic fertilizers have not come close to replacing the chemicals that state farms depended on for decades.
Sealed away behind an electrified fence during the 1990s, Shin was unaware that millions of his countrymen were desperately hungry.
Neither he nor his parents (as far as Shin knew) had heard that the government was struggling to feed the army or that people were dying of starvation in their apartments in North Korean cities, including the capital.
They did not know that tens of thousands of North Koreans had abandoned their homes and were walking into China in search of food. Nor were they beneficiaries of the billions of dollars’ worth of food aid that poured into North Korea. During those chaotic years, as the basic functioning of Kim Jong Il’s government stalled, think-tank experts in the West were writing books with doomsday titles such as The End of North Korea.
The end was nowhere in sight inside Camp 14, which was self-sufficient except for occasional trainloads of salt.
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.
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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 called Moon Sung Sim. They walked to school together for five years and sat in the same classroom. Then in secondary school, they spent another five years in each other’s company.
Shin viewed Hong Sung Jo as his closest companion. They played jacks between classes at school and their mothers worked at the same farm. Neither boy, though, ever invited the other to his house to play. Trust among friends was poisoned by constant competition for food and the pressure to snitch. Trying to win extra food rations, children told teachers and guards what their neighbours were eating, wearing and saying.
Collective punishment at school also turned classmates against each other. Shin’s class was often given a daily quota of trees to plant or acorns to gather. If they failed to meet expectations, everyone in the class was penalized. Teachers would order Shin’s class to give up its lunch ration (for a day or sometimes a week) to another class that had filled its quota. In work details, Shin was usually slow, often last.
As Shin and his classmates grew older, their work details, called ‘rallies of endeavour’, grew longer and more difficult. During ‘weeding combat’, which occurred between June and August, primary school students worked from four in the morning until dusk pulling weeds in corn, bean and sorghum fields.
When Shin and his classmates entered secondary school, they were barely literate. But by then classroom instruction had come to an end. Teachers became foremen. Secondary school was a staging ground for work details in mines, fields and forests. At the end of the day, it was a gathering place for long sessions of self-criticism.
Shin entered his first coal mine at the age of ten. He and five of his classmates (three boys and three girls, including his neighbour Moon Sung Sim) walked down a steep shaft to the face of the mine. Their job was to load coal into two-ton ore cars and push them uphill on a narrow rail track to a staging area. To meet their daily quota, they had to get four cars up the hill.
The first two took all morning. After a lunch of milled corn and salted cabbage, the exhausted children, their faces and clothes covered in coal dust, headed back to the coalface, carrying candles in the ink-black mine.
One day, pushing the third car, Moon Sung Sim lost her balance and one of her feet slipped beneath a steel wheel. Shin, who was standing next to her, heard a scream. He tried to help the writhing, sweating
girl remove her shoe. Her big toe was crushed and oozing blood. Another student tied a shoelace around her ankle as a kind of tourniquet.
Shin and two other boys lifted Moon into an empty coal car and pushed it to the top of the mine. Then they carried her to the camp hospital, where her mangled toe was amputated without anaesthetic and treated with salt water.
In addition to harder physical work, secondary school students spent more time finding fault with themselves and each other. They wrote in their cornhusk notebooks, preparing for the nightly self-censure sessions that took place after the evening meal. About ten students a night had to admit to something.
Shin tried to meet with his classmates before these sessions to sort out who would confess to what. They invented sins that would satisfy teachers without provoking draconian punishment. Shin remembers confessing to eating corn he found on the ground and to taking a catnap when no one was looking. If students volunteered enough transgressions, punishments were usually a smack on the head and a warning to work harder.
Wedged closely together, twenty-five boys slept on the concrete floor in the secondary school dormitory. The strongest boys slept near – but not too near – a coal-heated flue that ran under the floor. Weaker boys, including Shin, slept farther away and often shivered through the night. Some had no choice but to try to sleep on top of the flue, where they risked severe burns when the heating system flared up.
Shin remembers a stoutly built, prideful twelve-year-old named Ryu Hak Chul. He slept wherever he chose and was the only boy who dared sass a teacher.
Ryu ditched his work assignment one day, and his disappearance was quickly reported. His teacher sent Shin’s class to find the missing boy.
Escape from Camp 14 Page 3