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By Root 990 0

arriving prisoners were usually the first to die. If you made it through the adjustment period, though, you could expect to live for a good ten years more. The most important thing was fighting malnutrition, which was more punishing than even mistreatment by guards. Most of the camp’s diseases were not very serious, but in our weakened state a simple cold could kill. Psychological factors doubtless also played a role. Those who once lived in Japan were accustomed to a comfortable, modern existence and consequently suffered more than the others. For them, the adjustment to normal North Korean life had already been difficult enough. Many had hardly negotiated this transition when they suddenly found themselves transported to a concentration camp! The arrest itself was a brutal shock, a terrible blow to their spirit. These were people who pinned their every hope on Kim Il-sung and his brand of communism, and from one day to the next they saw themselves thrown into a camp, labeled traitors and sons of criminals, and treated as the lowest of slaves. It was more than many of them could take.

I almost died during my first months in the camp. The primary reason was the corn. Despite my grandmother’s tireless efforts to make it appetizing, after a certain point I just couldn’t digest it anymore. My problem was not in the least extraordinary: everyone struggled with it, though women for some reason had an easier time. I didn’t know of a single man who didn’t suffer at least one serious bout of diarrhea during his stay in Yodok. The ordeal, which generally lasted two or three months, would leave one thin and greatly weakened. The diarrhea was made all the worse by the ghastly conditions of the latrines. The filth was unspeakable. With the sparkling whiteness of our Pyongyang bathroom still fresh in my mind, just the sight of the small stinking huts was enough to make my stomach turn. There were only seven outhouses with four places each for an entire village of two to three thousand people. We did our business Turkish style, squatting over a tank we did our best not to dwell upon. No paper, of course. Each visitor had to come prepared with his own supply of sufficiently wide leaves. Bean and sesame leaves worked best. In July, during the rainy season, there was the danger of overflow; but it was much worse in winter, when the excrement froze and gradually built up toward the lip of the latrine. The detainees then were forced to choose between chiseling away at the growing mountain of excrement with a pickax or getting up in the middle of the night and digging a new hole of their own. If you chose the latter, it was worthwhile keeping track of the location, because you might later want to retrieve what you buried and use it to fertilize your vegetable bed.

Nineteen seventy-nine was probably even harder on my family than the preceding year. We’d faced the challenges of those fateful initial months, but weariness, malnutrition, and despair now nearly got the better of us. I was still friendless and often scorned by my teammates, who mistook my inability to keep pace for willful laziness. In the space of a few months or years, the camp had turned them into little savages. Several tried to provoke me and show me up, so that I would respect their would-be superiority. But having been in the camp since their early youth, they were all runts, and I didn’t let them push me around.

My stomachaches, however, continued unabated. I could feel my strength dwindling, and my three or four daily fits of diarrhea were not helping. Just as grievous, though, was the absence of my mother, whom I missed more poignantly with every passing day. My grandmother had long been at a loss to explain her absence, but in that year, 1979, the explanation finally came. One day a security agent summoned my father and announced to him that his wife had requested, and received, her divorce. Father doubted the process had been voluntary, but it was impossible for him to know for sure. The uncertainty deepened his sadness and anxiety. As for me, I couldn’t understand