by Paul Fischer
In some camps prisoners are assigned to each other, two by two, to watch each other as they sleep, reporting anything suspicious that might be said. Medieval torture—beating with sticks and rocks, hanging over bonfires, the sinking of hooks into the flesh, the breaking and ripping and chopping off of fingers and limbs—is used in interrogations. In something called the Clock Torture, the prisoner is made to stand on a table in front of the other prisoners; the warden or a guard then calls a time and the prisoner has to re-create the hands on a clock face with his body and hold the position until the next time is shouted out. This is done until the prisoner collapses, and is done to children and pregnant women just as often as to able-bodied men. Guards are authorized to rape. Children are executed in front of their mothers, wives in front of their husbands. If they don’t die of violence or torture, the inmates will often die in work accidents in the mines or in the blazing factories; and if they survive even that they will die of starvation or of one of the many untreated illnesses that abound in a place where people are not allowed to wash or to change their clothes, where they are made to eat filthy food and sleep huddled against one another on cold, mattressless floors. If an inmate dies, family outside will not be informed; and if a prisoner is eventually released, he or she will be made to sign a confidentiality agreement, undertaking never to disclose what happened behind bars. Most prisoners are never told what crime they were found guilty of committing in the first place.
Just one level down from the labor camps for political prisoners are the “reeducation camps,” or kyohwaso (literally “enlightenment centers”), with much the same conditions but smaller than the sprawling internment camps. There are about twenty such prisons all over North Korea, the inmates of which are termed “bad” or “subversive elements” guilty of political crimes, common crimes (murder, traveling without a permit), or economic crimes (Pyongyang’s euphemism for theft, illegal border crossings, smuggling, or illegal market trading and private enterprise). Unlike the internment camps, where prisoners are considered “irredeemable,” prisoners in these reeducation facilities undergo ideological instruction every day and can entertain a slight hope of returning to “normal” society. Some prisoners are kept in their cells, but the majority work every day from 7 a.m. to sunset, stopping only for dinner and for ideology sessions. Officially, the reeducation camps are not prisons but rehab facilities, and the government claims that the inmates, “unable to live with their guilty conscience(s),” turned themselves in and volunteered to stay there.
Here torture was still the norm. One woman, Lee Soon-Ok, says her interrogation for a petty offense began with being thrown on the floor and covered in a blanket while twenty or thirty men kicked and punched her repeatedly until she passed out. She was then questioned for three days straight and hit whenever she closed her eyes or drifted to sleep. She was abused for several months after that—shoved into a brick pottery kiln until she lost consciousness from the heat, flogged while strapped naked to a chair, strapped to a bench and had water forced down her throat, had her teeth punched out and sticks placed between her fingers and twisted. After passing out from one punishment she woke up to find two men standing on a plank laid across her stomach, and was unable to stand up for two weeks. Her crime was to have refused to give a senior security official extra fabric (beyond his allocated ration) to make himself a jacket in the style of one he had seen on Kim Jong-Il. The punishment for giving the official more than his allocated portion would have been equally bad or worse.
Another North Korean, a school principal, testified to having found the bodies of two teachers at his school; when he reported the crime he was arrested for the murders without any form of investigation. To extract a confession the state police tortured him with electricity until his ears and fingers literally melted. Later, when thieves confessed to the murders, he was released, lame and deformed, under the condition that he sign a form pledging he would never reveal his experience under pain of being imprisoned and tortured again.
There was, literally, no escape. If you killed yourself, and many did, your surviving family members were brought to the camp or, if they were there already, executed or sent to solitary confinement, locked in a cell so small there was only room to sit, with spikes sticking out of the walls to prevent prisoners from leaning against them for rest.
* * *
The detention center was loud and crowded. They made Shin strip, took his clothes, and handed him prison dress, which Shin felt sure was an old Chinese uniform from the Korean War. When he was done changing, they threw him in a solitary cell barely big enough to lie down in. There was one tiny slit of a barred window high up on the wall, a steel door on the other wall. The wooden floor was filthy with old bodily fluids. It felt like a dungeon chamber.
They brought him a stone bowl filled “with a mixture of corn and beans sprinkled with rice,” and an aluminum spoon with no handle. Two guards stood by the door.
“You must obey the rules I am about to tell you,” one of them barked. “First, until I give you instructions to sleep, you must sit up at attention with your back straight and your hands on your knees. You are to look straight ahead with your eyes wide open. You are not to move your head or your hands at all. Do you understand?” Shin nodded weakly. He took a mouthful of gruel and spat it out. It was full of stones. “Second: to use the toilet, you will raise your hand and ask for permission. Third: at lights out a bell will ring. When the bell rings you are allowed to move. After the bell rings we will check your cell and give you permission to lie down. Only then can you lie down. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
Shin forced himself to finish the food. The guards took the empty bowl and locked the steel door. The sun sank lower than the window, and Shin Sang-Ok was left in darkness.
* * *
In prison, Shin suffered from hunger, sickness, and loneliness. One of his toes, frostbitten during his escape attempt, became infected. He shivered with anxiety constantly and grew to crave food “like an animal.” As he sat in his cell, back straight and hands on his knees, he could hear other prisoners being beaten for disobeying orders or for breaking position without permission. One day he heard a woman cry and realized the prison was unisex. Fights broke out regularly among the guards, usually sparked by one of them calling another a “liberal” or a “democrat,” the two worst insults in the prison.
Shin was bewildered by his treatment. The guards cursed and barked at him as they did everyone else. He had neither soap nor toothpaste, instead using salt to brush his teeth, and he ate the same pebble-filled saltwater slop, always meatless but occasionally fortified with chunks of radish or cabbage, given to every other prisoner. But when he fell ill a doctor was called, and when the nights were cold the guards brought him several extra blankets, both luxuries other inmates were not afforded. When a certain woman was on kitchen duty, in addition to his gruel Shin received a bowl of rice pot tea, a staple Korean drink also known as burnt-rice tea, made by swirling some water around the pot used to cook rice, scraping the burnt rice off the bottom of the pot, and pouring the warm mixture into a cup. The tea tasted delicious, like his mother’s when he was a child.
His cell also seemed to have become the place where guards stopped on their patrols up and down the hall. Inevitably they would lean on the door and wait for him to notice their unmoving presence. Then, in a low voice, they would ask him questions about life in South Korea.
“In South Korea, there are places with women for entertainment, aren’t there?”
“Of course there are,” Shin replied.
“And if one goes there … can you fondle and fool around with the women?”
“Well…”
“If you pay them,” the sentry continued, “you can do anything, right? Right?”
Shin nodded. “Sure,” he said.
The man nodded, a grin on his face, and stepped away from the door.
The next day, a different guard asked Shin, “Can anyone buy cho
colate in the South?”
“If one has money, one can go to any store and buy it,” Shin answered.
“You mean only the high-ranking officials, right?”
“No, everyone can.”
“Oh, sure!” The guard walked away, shaking his head.
“A wind this strong blows the roofs off all the huts in South Korea, doesn’t it?” another guard asked sarcastically, on a day when a gale was blowing around the detention center.
“I have a hard time with your capitalist smell,” yet another guard whispered. “How can you reek of it so much?”
“I smell like a capitalist?”
“That strong smell of cosmetics.” Shin realized the guard could still smell the Japanese soap he had used at the guesthouse. I can’t believe he can still smell it, let alone find it too strong, he thought.
The silent, snatched conversations gave Shin an opportunity to ask his own questions.
“Comrade—” he started with one guard.
“We are not your comrades. Call us ‘sir.’”
“Sir, where is this place?”
“What use is it for you to know?” the guard asked. “You want to know where you are? This is a detention center.”
“Is it the place for…?” Shin asked, drawing his hand across his throat. The guard shook his head.
“This isn’t that kind of place. Those people are put somewhere else.”
As the sun rose and set, Shin used stones picked from his rice to count the days, reaching up to place one on the windowsill every night before he went to sleep. Mice ran in and out of holes in the wall, climbing into the dry toilet and trying to feed on the feces within. When the guards weren’t looking Shin picked up his handleless spoon, the only object he was allowed inside his cell, and carved his name in the wall, then a full sentence. “The concrete wall was hard and my carving barely left a mark,” Shin said, “but slowly it started to become visible.” The sentence read Shin Sang-Ok died here one day in 1979. He didn’t expect to see the outside of the prison again. From now on his life was wasted. Maybe someone from the next generation would one day stand here and read the faded pronouncement. Maybe, one day, “my family and the world would know: I had no other way out.”
* * *
There were fifteen pebbles on the windowsill when Shin was called out of his cell by the center’s warden. The warden’s office was in a separate building about a hundred yards away; the guards drove Shin there in a jeep. He held his face out in the fresh air, relishing every second. Inside the warden’s office were his old instructor the Deputy Director, the warden, and a man Shin did not know, sent from the Ministry for Social Safety. The deputy director asked Shin if he regretted his actions and saw the error of his ways. Shin hung his head.
“I have given a lot of thought to my actions,” Shin said. “I realize how wrong I was. I didn’t know Comrade Kim Jong-Il’s true intention for me, so I made a foolish mistake.”
“Not just ‘Comrade’ Kim Jong-Il,” the man from the ministry cautioned, “but our beloved Leader Comrade Kim Jong-Il.”
“Yes, sir, I didn’t realize our beloved Leader Comrade Kim Jong-Il’s intent and I made a mistake. I have thought about my foolishness and repented.”
“Is there anything else?” the Deputy Director asked coldly. Shin’s escape must have gotten him in serious trouble. Shin couldn’t think of anything to say.
“Give me at least one egg a day, please,” he finally blurted out. The Deputy Director wrote down his answer and then he and the man from the ministry stood up and left. The guards took Shin back to his cell.
This procedure was repeated several times over the next three months. Every time Shin groveled. “If Choi Eun-Hee is alive, let me see her,” he told the Deputy Director once, “and we will work together for the Great Leader and the Dear Leader. We will work diligently.” “I tried to escape for my family,” he pleaded on another occasion, “but now I will sacrifice what is insignificant for the greater good. Give me a chance.” The lies came easier every time. He would have done anything to get out of that prison.
One day, after another of those absurd ersatz parole hearings, the doctor visited Shin and gave him Russian multivitamins. After that the vitamins came every day. They were another excuse for his jailers to linger around his cell.
“I heard that if you take these every day, you don’t get hungry,” one of the guards said one morning, holding one of the pills up to the light and studying it curiously.
“No, it’s just a dietary supplement,” Shin answered. “You still need to eat.”
“I heard someone say it, though…”
“People take a lot of vitamins in the South,” Shin said, steering the conversation where he knew it would head anyway.
“What?” The guard looked at him. “The officials, right?”
“No, no. They’re sold in pharmacies.”
“Anyone can buy them?”
“Of course,” Shin said.
The guard shook his head at the wonders of the South. Suddenly he punched the door to the cell next door and shouted at the prisoner inside. “Answer so I can understand you, you dog! You slime!” He laughed out loud.
“What’s that fellow in for?” Shin asked.
“An economic offense,” the jailer asked.
“There’s such a thing as an economic offense?”
The guard spat. “He’s a thief, understand?”
On April 9, five days after his youngest child’s third birthday and shortly after they started giving Shin vitamin pills, the warden came to fetch Shin and took him to an office, where a guard cut his hair into a military crew cut with a shaving razor. Then Shin was led to the employees’ bathroom and told to take a shower. The clothes he wore the day of his failed escape were returned to him. When he was washed and dressed the warden walked him to his office, where the Deputy Director and the fat man from his original interrogation sat waiting.
The Deputy Director nodded and the fat man stood. “Comrade,” he began, his guttural voice shaking, “you have destroyed state property and planned to escape from our country. You should be given the death penalty.” Shin stopped breathing. “However, we have decided to overlook your offenses this time, so you must work hard for the People and the state. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Shin answered, “yes!”
“Don’t forget the warmhearted generosity of the state,” the fat man warned.
“Thank you,” Shin agreed.
Another anonymous Mercedes waited outside. The Deputy Director walked alongside Shin as he stepped up to it. He hadn’t said a word to Shin since that first interrogation, three months ago. He looked thinner, Shin thought, as if he were undernourished; perhaps even like a man who had gone through some suffering. Maybe he had been punished for allowing Shin to escape. As Shin opened the car door the Deputy Director stared at him bitterly.
“You look like hell,” he snarled. “Just look at yourself.”
The Mercedes drove Shin back to the Chestnut Valley, this time to a house farther down the road, over the Taedong River and past a huge painted billboard showing a smiling, hardworking Kim Il-Sung instructing the local farmers. The new house was smaller and less luxurious than the last one. There were bars on every window, guard posts out front and in the back, and searchlights on every side.
As they entered, the Deputy Director chastised Shin for “causing so much pain” and told him he hoped he would stay out of trouble from now on. He sat Shin down and ordered him to write a letter of apology to Kim Jong-Il.
It took Shin three days to finish the letter to the Deputy Director’s satisfaction. Within a month, he had started to save food for another escape.
17
The Torture Position
“I’ve decided to live in North Korea for good,” Shin told the Deputy Director. “Maybe I could tell you about my life, and you could give me some advice.”
He settled into his ideological studies with all the fervor he could muster. H
e read the three volumes of The History of Kim Il-Sung’s Anti-Japanese Struggle, wrote the most ingratiating book report the screenwriter in him could write, and even memorized long passages to impress his instructor. They watched two North Korean movies a day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. When Kim Il-Sung’s birthday came around on April 16, Shin joined in the champagne toasts, even though he usually didn’t drink. “I quaffed [my first drink] in a single gulp and asked for another glass,” he recalled. “Then I made a toast, too. ‘I wish our beloved Great Leader Kim Il-Sung long life and prosperity!’”
Vigilance at the house had been stepped up. Shin’s bedroom was located on the upper floor, with the other rooms on the same level arranged so that his room was visible from each, allowing them to monitor his comings and goings. Downstairs had the usual living room–cum–projection room, a dining room, and a third bedroom for another live-in attendant. Two guards lived with Shin. He was told they were his “cook and receptionist.” The Deputy Director, who had slept in the same house as him in the Chestnut Valley, now stayed elsewhere and only came by to give Shin his lessons. Shin wasn’t allowed out of the house, not even in the backyard, unless the Deputy Director was with him. All windows except one in the dining room were literally nailed shut. At night when everyone was asleep a ferocious dog was let loose on the grounds.
April turned into May, May into June, and suddenly it was July. It was hot and muggy, the flowers and plants outside the house a dazzling array of colors. All day the air throbbed with the thick hum of locusts. Locked away indoors, Shin collected everything he came across—scraps of food, salt, matches—in an improvisational frenzy, without taking time to think what purpose they might serve. “I knew this would be my last chance,” he said. “If I was caught, I would be killed.”