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Title Page

PREFACE FOR THE REVISED EDITION

Introduction

ONE - A HAPPY CHILDHOOD IN PYONGYANG

TWO - MONEY AND THE REVOLUTION CAN GET ALONG

THREE - NEXT YEAR IN PYONGYANG !

FOUR - IN A CONCENTRATION CAMP AT THE AGE OF NINE

FIVE - WORK GROUP NUMBER 10

SIX - THE WILD BOAR : A TEACHER ARMED AND READY TO STRIKE

SEVEN - DEATH OF A BLACK CHAMPION

EIGHT - CORN, ROACHES, AND SNAKE BRANDY

NINE - DEATH AT YODOK

TEN - THE MUCH-COVETED RABBITS

ELEVEN - MADNESS STALKS THE PRISONERS

TWELVE - BIWEEKLY CRITICISM AND SELF-CRITICISM

THIRTEEN - PUBLIC EXECUTIONS AND POSTMORTEM STONINGS

FOURTEEN - LOVE AT YODOK

FIFTEEN - SOJOURN IN THE MOUNTAIN

SIXTEEN - TEN YEARS IN THE CAMP: THANK YOU, KIM IL-SUNG!

SEVENTEEN - THE NORTH KOREAN PARADISE

EIGHTEEN - THE CAMP THREATENS AGAIN

NINETEEN - ESCAPE TO CHINA

TWENTY - SMALL-TIME PROSTITUTION AND BIG-TIME SMUGGLING IN DALIAN

TWENTY-ONE - ARRIVAL IN SOUTH KOREA

TWENTY-TWO - ADAPTING TO A CAPITALIST WORLD

EPILOGUE

Copyright Page

Author (right), age 19, one year after his release from the Yodok labor camp with (left to right) his third uncle, sister Mi-ho, grandmother, and third aunt.

A Member of the Perseus Books Group New York

PREFACE FOR THE REVISED EDITION

As a reporter for Chosun Ilbo, South Korea’s leading daily newspaper, I have been covering issues related to North Korea since 2000. I’ve met and reported on approximately 500 North Korean refugees and defectors, those on the run in China and those who found freedom in South Korea. One of them told me, “At the peak of the famine in 1998, I saw numerous corpses strewn on the ground in front of the railroad station in Hamhung [a northeastern coastal city and the capital of South-Hamkyung Province]. People died so fast that hundreds of them had to be buried in mass graves at the Mt. Donghung Cemetery as coffins were in short supply.”

Almost all of the North Koreans I interviewed described similar incidents from the Great Famine in the late 1990s. People foraged throughout forests and on hillsides for edible herbs. Soon they had to resort to boiling tree bark and the roots of rice plants to make the tough fibers digestible. I was reminded of the horrendous times I went through in the Yodok gulag before I was released in 1987. I asked myself: “Has the entire country turned into a gigantic gulag? What would the prison camps look like now? What are my fellow gulag inmates enduring now in order to survive?”

I risked my life and fled North Korea in 1992 and sought refuge in South Korea soon afterward in order to expose to the world the unimaginable crimes committed in the political prison camps by the Pyongyang regime. At the age of nine, I had been taken to one of them in Yodok, South-Hamkyung Province, due to my parent’s alleged guilt by association to my grandfather. I was destined to spend ten years of grim residence there.

Upon reaching freedom in the Republic of Korea at the end of my journey, which took me first through China, I shed tears of joy. During the press conference that shortly followed, however, I was struck speechless by some of the questions asked of me by certain journalists. It was clear to me that those journalists were trying to squeeze out of me only answers they wanted to hear—“Did you concoct part of your story with the help of Seoul’s intelligence service?” That ridiculous question turned out to be just the beginning of my ordeal in the so-called free world.

No matter how hard I and other defectors from the North have tried since then, far too many people in Seoul have turned a blind eye to the truth about North Korea’s concentration camps. When the Koreans refused to believe us, perhaps I was naive to expect the international community to respond more sympathetically. No one paid any particular attention to us.

Here in South Korea, where I had sought asylum with high hopes, a growing proportion of the populace tend to believe that one can achieve peace only through reconciliation and cooperation. How can so many ignore Kim Jong Il’s brutal persecution