A Kim Jong-Il Production

by Paul Fischer

  They usually didn’t worry about the cars getting stolen, either. There was no way to hide a stolen vehicle and no one to resell it to. Everyone who knew how to operate an automobile was employed by the Party, which knew where they lived. In this case, the Mercedes was parked inside of a walled, guarded compound. What was there to fear?

  Shin stared at the key dangling in the ignition. Clouds of vapor formed in the cold nighttime air as he breathed in and out, the possibilities rushing through his mind. This had to be his chance. Surely, this had to be his chance.

  * * *

  “Why do you want a map?” the Deputy Director asked, eyeing Shin suspiciously.

  Shin cleared his throat. “Well, I’m having a hard time memorizing the names of the battlefields where the anti-Japanese war led by Kim Il-Sung took place, especially in Manchuria.”

  “You must add ‘the Great Leader’ when speaking about our Fatherly Leader.”

  “Sorry. Yes, the war led by the Great Leader Kim Il-Sung.”

  “I’ll bring you a map. You must concentrate hard on your studies.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  * * *

  There were Japanese consulates in Vladivostok and Nakhodka in the USSR, and, as of January 1, 1979—as Shin learned from picking up the South Korean frequency, at night, on his bedside radio—there would be an American embassy in Beijing. China seemed the most accessible option. If he could drive the one hundred miles to Chongju, a city in the northwest corner of North Korea, and then get past the last few remaining towns between there and the Yalu River—Korea’s natural border with China—then somehow get across the river … He remembered the Su’pung Dam, which the Japanese had built in the late thirties, when he was just a child, and thought he might be able to cross there. After that, all he would have to do was jump on a train, or follow the railroad tracks west, and find Beijing. If he were to escape, Shin speculated, the North Koreans would probably assume he would try the shortest way to South Korea and so look to the south for him, rather than to the north. That might give him a couple of days’ head start before the search parties even looked to the Chinese border. By then, hopefully, he would be gone.

  All he had to do now was be patient and wait until the lake on the grounds froze over. Then, he thought, the Yalu would be frozen solid too and he could walk across. Every day, he went over and over the plan in his head. When his attendants offered him warmer winter clothes, he picked out as many gray and green shades as possible so that he would be able to hide more easily.

  On December 19, a sheet of ice covered the lake.

  Ten days later, confident that the ice was there to stay, Shin decided to make his escape.

  * * *

  The wind was so strong it rattled the windows. One of the young female attendants pushed open the door to Shin’s bedroom and checked that he was in bed, asleep. Satisfied, she pulled the door half shut and retreated down the hallway.

  Shin waited a few seconds before getting out of bed. He grabbed the makeshift sack he’d crafted out of old clothes and hidden behind a sofa and stepped quietly into the hallway. In the kitchen, the card game was well under way; the rest of the house was silent and empty. The house staff had retreated to their own bedrooms. Shin tried the front door and found it unlocked. His guards, he thought, must have felt confident he couldn’t make it past the guardhouse and off the grounds, so why lock the front door?

  Shin was about to open the door but quickly hid as one of the card players went outside briefly to urinate on the side of the path. “Damn, it’s cold,” the attendant muttered as he came back inside. Shin slipped out of the house and crept over to the car. It was a loud, unsettling night, the trees bumping and wailing in the gale. He popped the car door open as silently as he could. They key was where he expected it to be. He quietly turned it halfway and the dashboard gauges lit up. Just under half a tank of gas. Maybe enough to make it to Chongju, maybe not.

  Too late. It was now or never. He dropped his sack on the passenger seat and, climbing in, put the gear in neutral and released the hand brake. Slowly, the car rolled downhill. The next few minutes, Shin knew, would be crucial. If another of the guards came out to urinate, or if anyone looked out the window and saw the car moving, he was done for.

  No one did. Once the car had rolled far enough, he flicked on the ignition, turned on the lights, and hit the gas, steadying his foot, driving casually. He reached the guardhouse and took a deep breath. Seeing him coming, the guard saluted sharply and let the car through. Shin drove normally until the next turn, took it—and then hammered his foot down on the gas.

  If I ever make another movie, this experience will come in handy, he thought as he floored it toward Pyongyang. When he got to the city, the streets were empty, no one paying any attention to the routine sight of a recklessly driven Party Mercedes tearing down the streets. He located the right road out of the city and followed it. The speedometer on the dashboard was bobbing just over eighty miles per hour.

  He had formulated his plan carefully, but he couldn’t account for everything: not knowing his way around unfamiliar roads in the dark, for instance, or how much effort the authorities would put into finding him. He hadn’t considered just how easy it would be to track down such a conspicuous car in a nation where cars were vanishingly rare. Most important, he did not know that almost one in three North Korean citizens were government informers, and that informing was such a pervasive part of the culture that there was no such thing as darkness to hide within. Nor did he know that the Party so tightly controlled its citizens’ movements that even traveling from one town to another required applying for a detailed permit weeks in advance.

  Looking out at the road illuminated by his headlights, ignorant of all of this, Shin felt hardy and optimistic.

  He was halfway to China when he came to a fork in the road that he didn’t remember from the map. He picked an option and kept going. It was the wrong one. He found himself driving along on a minor, gravel road. Suddenly someone, perhaps a farmer, appeared in the glare of his headlights and Shin instinctively jerked the wheel. The car skidded noisily and crashed into a ditch. By the time he had extricated himself from his seat the farmer had disappeared. Jumping back in, Shin put the car in reverse and hit the gas. The rear tires spun wildly, the car unmoving.

  It took half an hour to get the car out of the trench. Every panicked second, Shin wondered whether the guards at the Chestnut Valley house had noticed yet that he or the car was missing. The back of the car was badly caved in, almost touching the back wheel. Shin pulled the jack from the trunk and fixed it the best he could. As he threw the jack back into the trunk he checked his watch: 10 p.m. already. He got in the car, switched on the engine, and sped back to the crossroads, tires screeching sharply as he took the road he should have taken almost an hour before.

  The accident had frayed his nerves. At Sukchon, just a few miles farther—and only halfway to Chongju—Shin ran into his first military guard post, controlling vehicles crossing the Chongchon River. He had thought that perhaps he would bluff his way through, or that the guards, recognizing the Party car, would just wave him along. He couldn’t manage the former and the latter wasn’t happening. The bridge was a narrow single-lane construction. Instead of stopping, Shin ignored the guard’s signal and blew right past him. It started to snow. The road, if one could call it that, was little more than patches of gravel and rocks, the Mercedes bouncing and clanging along the surface as Shin insisted on driving as fast as his steering could handle. One of the rear tires popped loudly. The country roads three hours outside of Pyongyang clearly weren’t made for town cars.

  Unwilling to quit, Shin ground along with a flat tire until the Chongju train station came into view, a big, beaming portrait of Kim Il-Sung adorning its brightly lit façade. Shin took a right, and the Su’pung Dam rose ahead. Railroad tracks were running alongside the road now. This was where Shin had planned on dumping the car. He pulled up off the trail, turned off the ignition, and hoppe
d out.

  It was freezing. On foot he followed the train tracks. A soldier spotted him, briefly, and called out to him, “Comrade! Comrade!” Shin pretended he didn’t hear and kept going. The soldier was too cold to bother chasing him. “I started to run,” Shin said. “I could barely breathe, but I knew if I stopped it would mean the end for me.” After what felt like ages he arrived at a small train station. Large freight crates sat by the platform, labeled “explosives.” He huddled behind them, out of sight. It was eleven o’clock now, the night still young. I wonder when someone will find the car, Shin thought. Is the driver back at the house still playing cards? Or has he already discovered my escape?

  It wasn’t long before he heard the sound of an approaching freight train. An old steam locomotive, the only kind of train North Korea could afford, was slowly trundling toward him. Crouching down by the track, Shin waited for the train to ease by and then jumped aboard an empty freight car full of stones, probably some kind of ore. Shin sat down and stretched his aching legs. His whole body was rigid with tension.

  “Thank you, God,” he said out loud.

  He leaned his head back and dozed off.

  Just a couple of stops later three men dressed as railroad workers exited the station, walked straight over to the car in which Shin was hiding, and dragged him out. A man from the state police was waiting on the platform, rubbing his eyes, looking as if he’d just been woken up. “Are you the one who ditched the Mercedes?” he asked in a half yawn.

  Shin didn’t know that the North Korean railroad posted guards at half-mile intervals to catch illegal travelers and prevent accidents. He had been spotted as soon as he boarded the train.

  Shinonchon station, where he was caught, was less than ten miles from the Chinese border.

  16

  Shin Sang-Ok Died Here

  They marched him inside the station, Shin dragging his makeshift rucksack behind him on the ground. All the energy had drained out of him. His face was smeared black from the coal dust blowing through the train. He felt wretched, pathetic, but he was also filled with an odd kind of relief. I don’t care, he thought. I’d rather die than be stuck here. They can do anything they want to me.

  “Give me some water to clean up,” Shin said to the man from the state police.

  “Give it to him,” the man drowsily ordered someone.

  “Where’s the bathroom?”

  They let Shin relieve himself and wash his hands and face. When he came outside, a jeep was pulling up near the tracks, the Deputy Director in the passenger seat, a furious look on his face. Shin could hear a helicopter thrumming up above. He closed his eyes and tried to empty his mind.

  They handcuffed him, and led him outside.

  * * *

  It was like a scene from a movie, Shin thought when it was all over.

  The helicopter hovered down to the ground at a small, deserted airfield. They pushed Shin out of the aircraft and bundled him into another jeep, a hood over his head, only taking it off once he was out of the car and inside a large building. He was led down a long corridor with stretches of identical doors on either side. His guards stopped at one of them, opened the door, and sat him on one of the three chairs that were the room’s only furnishings. On the other two, facing him, sat the Deputy Director and a fat man Shin didn’t know, so pudgy he sunk into his seat as if he had no spine. They both had pencils and paper in their hands.

  The fat man spoke first, in a voice that shook from deep inside the blubber. “You were headed north, past Chongju, in North Pyongan Province. That’s pretty far north.” He seemed to reflect on that for a moment. “You were headed that way by mistake, yes?”

  Shin didn’t know how to answer. “Did you take the wrong road or not?” the Deputy Director snapped. “Don’t you understand the question?”

  “I meant to go in that direction,” Shin said.

  “Why?” The Deputy Director’s voice was so angry and threatening that Shin felt it would pierce through his body.

  “Because I couldn’t bear living here anymore,” Shin replied.

  The fat one was scratching Shin’s answers down on his pad. The Deputy Director stood up and the fat man followed. As they left the room four guards stepped in, their cold eyes locked on Shin.

  In a few minutes, the two interrogators returned and sat back down across from Shin.

  “Then does this mean you lied in your New Year’s congratulatory letters?” the Deputy Director asked. Like Choi, Shin had been required to handwrite holiday letters of gratitude and admiration to both Kims.

  “Answer the question!” the fat man bellowed.

  “I wrote what I was told to write. I was writing letters to men I’ve never met. I thought I did quite well.”

  The two stared at him, astounded. After what seemed like a long time the fat man blinked and wrote the answer down, and they left the room again. The four guards returned. As he sat there Shin realized his interviewers were relaying his answers to someone and then returning with that person’s next line of inquiry. It wasn’t hard to figure out who that person was likely to be. Kim Jong-Il probably can’t believe I wanted to escape after being treated so nicely, Shin thought.

  The pair returned. “Where did you want to go?” the Deputy Director asked.

  “I was headed for China.”

  The two stepped out again, the four guards stepped in. A moment later, the interrogators returned with a new question.

  “How did you plan to get there?”

  “By riding the rails.”

  “‘Riding the rails’?” the fat one echoed, as if he had never heard the expression.

  “Yes. By riding the rails.”

  They left the room again. The routine continued, back and forth, more times than Shin could count. When it was over he had told them everything. He felt nothing but exhaustion, fatigue like a heavy blank sheet blotting out every other emotion. They walked him outside and, blinking in the afternoon light, he realized he was in Pyongyang. A statue of the Great Leader, the omnipresent smile on his face, stood in the front yard.

  Shin got back in the jeep. As the army vehicle drove through the city, Shin looked out the window. “It was a bleak, dismal scene. There were no signs of people. The streets were dead.”

  It was December 30, 1978. They drove him to prison.

  * * *

  The North Korean prison system has existed for as long as the People’s Republic has. There are an unknown number of prison camps throughout the country. Though the DPRK regime officially denies their existence, many are clearly visible on Google Maps. They hold an estimated 220,000 prisoners. Every North Korean knows of someone—a family member, a friend, a work acquaintance—who was taken away in the middle of the night and sent to the prison camps, never to be seen again. Though no one speaks of them, everyone—everyone—knows about them.

  The largest known prison camp, complete with mines and factories, covers a surface area greater than that of the entire city of Los Angeles. Citizens can be sent there for any offense—real, perceived, or trumped up—and, as North Korean law attributes collective guilt, a criminal’s act taints the rest of his or her bloodline, so that entire families, across three generations, are routinely condemned to hard labor or death. (Spouses, not being blood, are sometimes spared; but they are forced to divorce, their songbun is downgraded, their assets confiscated, and, if they have any relatives in the army or university, they are immediately expelled and “sent down to production,” which means being sent to work in the mines or iron-smelting furnaces.) The treatment in these prisons is so harsh and life threatening that a sentence longer than a few years is as good as the death penalty. Prisoners work long hours doing hard labor and are brutally punished if they fail to fulfill quotas. They are fed gruel and sadistically abused.

  Because of the way North Korean society is subdivided, from the hostile class to the core class, only “trusted” citizens are allowed to work in the prison camps as guards. “Trusted,” in practice, mean
s the wealthy elite. These guards are trained to dehumanize their prisoners, to see them as “dogs” or “animals” rather than people. They are also rewarded for preventing escapes, so stories abound of guards pretending to help a prisoner escape only to shoot or watch as he or she is electrocuted to death on electric wire, before dragging the body back to collect a bonus.

  The worst internment camps, the kwanliso (literally “custody management center”), are for traitors, political prisoners, and anyone found guilty of committing an “anti-state” crime, such as plotting to take over, collaborating with the imperialists, or, more innocuously, reading a foreign newspaper or cracking jokes about either Kim’s appearance or intelligence. Modeled on the Soviet gulag, the kwanliso were set up by Kim Il-Sung shortly after he took power as places to send anyone who threatened his regime. Sentences to the kwanliso are never for anything less than life, and public executions are commonplace. It’s hard to know what, exactly, goes on in the kwanliso, as few ever escape to tell. According to a few witnesses, prisoners are not allowed to have sex, so in mixed-gender prisons abortions and the killing of newborns are sanctioned by the state. These forced abortions are carried out by injecting poison into the fetus, simply cutting the mother’s womb open or, if all else fails, strangling the child the second it has taken its first breath. Informing is rewarded, so prisoners routinely turn on each other, behavior strongly encouraged by the prison administration. One former prisoner described witnessing a failed escape attempt. As the would-be escapee lay beaten on the ground, the prison’s other inmates were ordered to walk across him, pounding and crushing his bones and organs until he died. When an inmate was killed by hanging, his fellow prisoners were ordered to throw stones at him while he kicked and thrashed. Bodies were then left out overnight, sometimes even for days, as a reminder and an example.