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By Root 972 0

with a rock. A former top official in the Worker’s Party, Choe’s father was assigned to the gypsum quarry upon arriving at Yodok. It was a backbreaking, dangerous detail, on which laborers had to fill dozens of truckloads a day. His boy, Choe, was always being provoked and tormented by a particularly brutal guard infamous for whipping prisoners. When my friend’s father saw him spit in his son’s face, he became enraged and hit the guard over the head with a rock. The man collapsed and fell dead on the spot. The father was arrested and publicly executed at Kouep, one of Yodok’s two public execution sites, after which his family was transferred to Yongpyung.

In the first months of 1980, a rare happy circumstance befell our family. My uncle was transferred to the camp’s alcohol distillery. It was a major promotion and cause for the whole family to rejoice. Not only would my uncle be spared the grinding fatigue of farmwork, but by occasionally rerouting surplus inventory he could actually turn a little profit. The distillery jobs were among the most sought after in the camp. Work details in the gypsum quarry and the gold mine were reputedly the hardest and most dangerous. At the other end of the spectrum were the sweatshops, where my sister worked, and the farm produce shops, where the agents went to procure their cheese, bean curd, oil, and salt. (If the shops ever ran a surplus, the leftover foodstuffs were exported for sale outside the camp.) The coppersmith shop was also considered a good place to work, as was the joinery, where my father had been assigned to assist several seasoned craftsmen. But at the top of the list were the office jobs. We could imagine nothing better than sitting in an office, warm and sheltered from the winter cold. The lucky detainees selected for secretaryships were responsible for tracking major events: prisoner deaths and arrivals, the transport of goods in and out of the camp, the quantity of food distribution, and so forth. It was easy, human work, and it came with the assurance of shelter.

The agricultural teams like the one I was on could be occasionally pulled from the fields to help expedite a lagging production schedule elsewhere in the camp, or to lend a hand at the quarry. On a few occasions, I was temporarily assigned to work on construction sites, several of which were small dams. Every few months, camp authorities also trotted out their latest version of the “Let’s Earn Some Dollars for Kim Il-sung” campaign. These crusades were intended to make us heave with enthusiasm at the idea of harvesting exotic hardwoods, gathering wild ginseng, or producing whatever else the Party thought might fetch a few dollars on the free and open market.

But to return to the distillery. It produced three distinct types of brandy. The first two, distilled from corn and acorns, respectively, were intended for export and sale. The third, which counted snake as one of its ingredients, was reserved exclusively for the pleasure of our local guards. Before being added to the stew, the snakes were starved to death over a period of one month, which caused their venom to lose its toxicity. As far as I can recall, this spirit had no official name. Around the camp, we called it either Yodok Soul (literally, “Yodok Alcohol”), snake brandy, or Byungbung Soul, after the 5,000-foot-high mountain that is the native habitat for a rare medicinal plant sold as far away as Japan. The prisoners at Yodok always spoke with great confidence about the exceptional quality of the camp’s snake brandy, though I doubt any of them ever tasted it. The only prisoners who were ever admitted into the distillery were people who couldn’t or wouldn’t drink. In my ten years in the camp, I never saw a single prisoner drink so much as a drop of the local specialty.

My uncle was the distillery’s technical chief for seven years. No one had ever held the position for that long, and only the handful of detainees who worked in the guards’ office or in the bachelors’ kitchen ever enjoyed as many privileges. To land such a job, a prisoner needed