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By Root 1027 0

us. In the fields, it was sometimes possible for us to catch frogs, which were plentiful in this season. The amphibians could be skinned and cooked fresh or set out to dry in the sun and used later. Their eggs were also very much in demand. Besides the frogs, we also ate salamanders that we caught near a sweet-water spring. I never much liked the way they tasted, but they were said to be very nutritious. Eating three a day was supposed to keep you in great shape, like vitamin concentrates, though I have no idea whether this was science or faith. The way to eat a salamander is to grab it by the tail and swallow it in one quick gulp—before it can discharge a foul-tasting liquid. I often brought my grandmother salamanders so that she would stay healthy, but she never got the knack of swallowing them whole. We kids were the only ones who could do it easily. We ate anything that moved, making even the undiscriminating adults look picky by comparison. By the time a group of prisoners finished working a field, no animal was left alive. Even earthworms were fair game. When we were done with her, nature always needed a couple of seasons to recuperate before she could provide a fresh bounty of food. And yet our hunger remained, piercing, draining.

TEN

THE MUCH-COVETED RABBITS

I changed jobs many times that year. None was easy, but in the monotonous life of a child prisoner any change is welcome. I worked in the cornfield, buried corpses, gathered herbs up in the mountains. The outdoor work saved me from developing full-blown pellagra, whose first symptoms—the infamous glasses and the mad desire to eat everything—I had begun to develop. Up in the mountains I caught frogs and boiled their eggs in water, and this helped me fight off the disease.

For several weeks I also filled in at the gold mine, located on the lower slopes of the camp’s northern hills. Toward the end of the Japanese occupation, the mine had been assessed insufficiently profitable and shut down. Now that there was a free labor force, however, the calculations had changed. Seven to eight hundred men were employed in the mine. Working in teams of five, as in the rest of the camp, they entered the shafts without any protective gear—not even so much as a hard hat—and with only a flashlight or candle-powered storm lantern to light their way.

One day we learned that a special mobilization had been decreed to augment national gold production and to help raise foreign currency for Kim Il-sung. To fill the new quotas, the guards transferred several agricultural teams over to the mining site. My team was one of them, though we were spared the difficult details in the farthest depths of the mine. That, fortunately, would have required additional training, something that was considered a waste of time during a mobilization period. My team’s work consisted mainly of gathering and transporting minerals extracted by the veteran miners. While my job was relatively safe, I was very much affected by the scariness of the place. All of the galleries, even the deepest ones, which ran down a hundred yards, were poorly shored up. Cave-ins were common and left many miners permanently crippled. The place was so frightening it was considered cursed. According to camp legend, it always drew lightning during storms and, according to a few old-timers, several people—among them one guard—had been struck dead there by lightning bolts.

The mine work was as exhausting as it was dangerous. Since we didn’t have wheelbarrows, we were left to transport the excavated dirt on our backs, in sacks that we then dumped into oxcarts at the mouth of the tunnel. From there the gold-bearing earth was wheeled to a water basin, where other prisoners would pan it for nuggets. Since the river that wound through the camp was also believed to bear gold dust, during the mobilization period, special teams were formed and made to stand in the water and pan that, too.

Despite the dangers, mining did have a few advantages. To compensate for the difficult working conditions, miners were given slightly more food