The Aquariums of Pyongyang_ Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag - Chol-hwan Kang [58]
Yi Sae-bong was the person who really introduced me to Japan. I hassled him constantly for details about his school, the traffic, the movies, the department stores. I was amazed at his description of the automobile assembly lines, where robots put entire cars together in a matter of minutes. The most astounding things, though, were the toilets: they had chairs where you could sit and read a paper, or have a cup of coffee. It seemed so incredible to me. The first time Yi Sae-bong went to the bathroom at Yodok, he threw up.
The winter of 1982–83 was relatively mild. Yet ice and snow, alas, were not the only causes of death at Yodok. There were also accidents—terrible accidents—such as the one I witnessed while on special assignment at the clay quarry. A group of children had been ordered to excavate a ton of fine earth in a single afternoon, an absurd quota. Working without the benefit of either adult supervision or scaffolding, they burrowed child-sized tunnels into the foot of the cliff, whose environs soon turned gloomy with shadows and dust. My job that day was to carry the excavated earth over to the trucks that hauled it away. I was just finishing one of my trips when I heard a muted rumble, then screams. I ran toward the tunnel. There had been a cave-in. A number of kids were trapped. As I worked furiously to help dig out the rubble, I overheard my schoolmaster bantering with one of the guards.
“What a piece of work, these kids!” he mused. “Gone and collapsed the cliff again. What idiots! Guess they won’t be siring any little ones!”
We managed to pull five or six of the kids out alive, but all the rest were dead. I remember their bodies, blue but not yet stiffened. I felt a terrible anguish. These kids were my age; fate had simply been less kind to them. They should never have been given that work. Unfortunately, the story doesn’t end there. After giving the crew a sharp dressing-down, the teacher ordered everyone back to work—for the sake of discipline, I suppose. Still shaken, the kids begged to have the job put off until the next day, but the teacher wouldn’t have any of it. He kicked and slapped them until they rejoined their post—at the very place where they had just extracted their friends, whose bodies lay within view, waiting to be moved to the camp’s hospital.
Every village had one hospital—supposing that term may be justifiably applied to a two-room office reeking of disinfectant. This was the place where it was decided whether or not a prisoner was fit to work. The hospital’s furniture consisted of a table, a few chairs, and a single worn-out bed. The doctor, who was a prisoner, didn’t even have a lab coat. His only medical instrument was a stethoscope. There was a nurse to assist him, but he had no medicine apart from a few anti-inflammatories. The doctor’s main duty was filling out exemption forms for sick prisoners so they wouldn’t have to attend role call. In exceptionally grave cases, the doctor sometimes obtained antibiotics or some other injections, but this was rare.
Patients requiring immediate surgery—appendicitis cases, for example, and amputations—were treated at the camp’s one real hospital, otherwise reserved for guards and their families. It was a place prisoners tried to avoid, because after surgery they would be left alone, often to develop deadly secondary infections. If a patient required more than a rudimentary operation, he went untreated and was left to die.
Prisoners who suffered from pulmonary and hepatic ailments—of which there were many—were quarantined in a permanent structure. Epidemics, especially of flea-borne diseases such as scabies and typhus, were common. I had a teacher who was so afraid of contracting a disease that he once ordered us to leave the classroom and not come back until we