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The one advantage an escaping prisoner did have was a twelve-hour jump on his pursuers. Roll calls were held every six hours, but the guards only began investigating after they noticed two consecutive absences.

“Role call? When? Where?”

“You’re totally clueless,” responded the kid, laughing. “There are three role calls at Yodok camp, at five-thirty A.M., at noon, and at six-thirty P.M. They take place in front of the supply office, where work details are assigned to the different groups. Role calls last half an hour regardless of the weather. Only people with sick certificates are excused. Otherwise, everyone has to go, and you get punished if you don’t, or if you show up late.”

The kid then returned to the subject of escape, which was clearly dear to his heart. Only once had he heard the sirens go off and seen the security agents form into search parties and head up into the mountains. It took a while, but they eventually came down with their prey. The escaping prisoner had been stopped midcourse, well short of the summits he had hoped might spell freedom. He was tortured for a week or two, then executed.

“The punishment for attempted escape is execution. No exceptions. The guards make the whole village come out to watch it. . . . So given all that, I have a hard time seeing these mountains as very beautiful.”

We were silent, but the look on our faces must have communicated our horror. The boy noticed. Feeling a little guilty, perhaps, he tried to say something friendly and offer us a few bits of advice, which showed he was actually a nice kid whose humanity was still very much alive.

“Yeah,” he went on, “you gotta be really crazy to try to escape. On the other hand, sometimes you gotta be even crazier to stay, especially if you’re all alone, without family or friends. The work is hard, and there’s hardly ever enough food to take the edge off your hunger. . . . You’ll have to stick together, help each other out—and, remember, don’t trust anyone.”

“And you,” the boy said, turning to me, “you’ll be amazed at what they call school here. Anyway, good luck to you.”

His back was already turned and he was walking away, a towering bundle of grass balanced precipitously atop his head. We had spent too long talking and needed to hurry back. The guards had told us that at eight that morning our brigade leader would come by to explain the camp’s work details and rules of conduct. It was stressed that the whole family should be present. In North Korea—as I later learned was the case in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany—camp guards aren’t satisfied to do all the surveillance themselves: they designate prisoners, unwilling ones sometimes, to become local chiefs and carry out responsibilities the police can’t execute on their own. They collect information and have the power to punish recalcitrants, most notably by denouncing them to their superiors. The brigade chiefs are important links in the chain of command between the camp’s authorities and the common detainee. They each supervise about ten work teams and only need to work half time themselves.

The brigade leader was already there by the time my uncle and I got back to the hut. Standing alongside a guard, his companion on these missions, he was giving my family a rundown of the camp’s work rules. Grandmother would be the only one exempt from working, it being her responsibility to stay home and cook for the rest of us. The routine for my sister and me was school in the morning and manual labor in the afternoon. There would also be the common chores of chopping wood and hauling logs, growing corn, pulling weeds, and so forth, as well as obligatory participation in the Party’s recently initiated campaign for the foraging of wild ginseng in the mountains, a project sure to be “close to our hearts,” given our desire to redeem our bad conduct. The camp’s various work details were assigned to five-prisoner work teams, each with its own production quota. Work details were handed down from the brigade