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By Root 931 0

There was no one to confide in, no way to tell who was who. The veteran prisoners sometimes laughed at my father and uncle because of all the naïve questions they asked, which only made them more depressed. The only advice their fellow prisoners could offer was to have patience: they would learn to pick out the snitches soon enough. Until then, they would do well to keep their thoughts to themselves. The camp’s common wisdom turned out to be true. Within a few months, we all developed a sixth sense—a snitch radar, if you will—that told us who could be trusted and who could not. Yet a snitch is not necessarily a bad guy. The prisoner is usually picked for the job without being asked his or her opinion, and, in most cases, the honor is not one for which he or she is proud.

Another similarity between Yodok and the hard-labor camps was the layout. Many people tended to imagine concentration camps as confined spaces surrounded by barbed wire and watch towers. In fact, Yodok is only one of many expansive reservations where fields, rivers, and hills take the place of man-made obstacles. Since its opening in 1959, it has been the system’s largest camp. The idea for the prison was born when North Korea’s defense minister visited the area and was impressed by its topography. A little later the government trucked in several squads of prisoners to build a few permanent structures—surveillance posts, living quarters for guards and their families, workshops, schools—then had them hammer together the remaining boards to make the villages. Once that was done, all that remained was to seal off the mouth of the valley. My “village” lay a day’s walk—about twenty-five miles—from the foot of the surrounding mountains, which marked the edge of the camp. I was able to assess this distance during an authorized work outing to the mountain’s lower slopes. Subsequent assignments allowed me to expand my picture of the general layout, but, since permission to move widely was rarely granted, I had limited knowledge of areas beyond my usual work zone.

I would be dishonest to claim exhaustive knowledge of Yodok, and I am still annoyed by my ignorance of the place where I lived for so long.

Our isolation seemed almost normal to us. We also knew that isolation was a feeling shared by prisoners everywhere, throughout the ages. Yet unlike in many prisons, we were not allowed to receive packages. (I didn’t receive a single package during my entire stay.) The feeling of being isolated in the very place where I lived, to the point of not knowing who else was there or even where the camp was located, seemed particularly inhumane. It wasn’t just a way of keeping me in the dark about where I was, it was a means of attacking my identity. After a decade in Yodok, my knowledge of the camp boils down to this: of Yodok’s ten villages, four were for redeemables and six were for irredeemables, or political criminals. The latter group lived in a high-security zone that was separated from ours by several hills, as well as by rows of barbed wire rolled out along the valley’s floor.

The irredeemables were all lifers. They knew they were never leaving the camp. No matter how long their hearts continued to pump, or their lungs to breathe, they would never again live as citizens. Their children, too, would suffer this fate. As the official propaganda never tired of reminding us, it was necessary to “desiccate the seedlings of counterrevolution, pull them out by their roots, exterminate every last one of them.” That’s the actual word the North Korean authorities used: exterminate—myulhada. These prisoners were tossed into a world of phantoms and nonentities, a world so devoid of hope it didn’t even require its citizens to display portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, or to learn the “lessons of Kim Il-sung’s Revolution,” or to attend sessions for criticism and self-criticism. Painful and absurd as the latter were, such requirements were grudging admissions that the people subjected to them were still citizens worthy of reeducation. They had run astray of the Party’s path,