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By Root 976 0

especially when the Wild Boar asked everyone who “accidentally” forgot their socks to raise their hands. Fortunately, I wasn’t alone. Two-thirds of the class had their hands up. The teacher was outraged. He ordered the scatterbrains to go outside and line up. Then he came out and kicked his way furiously along the row of children. He was wearing canvas army boots and let them fly with all his strength. During beatings, it was common for us to exaggerate our pain in order to win sympathy, but this time we had no room for exaggeration. The cries of pain were real. The blow I took to the stomach was so violent that I collapsed on the spot and lost consciousness for a half hour.

A couple of years was all it took for the camp to utterly change a child. Instead of turning us into stalwart admirers of our Great Leader’s regime, as it was intended to do, the camp taught us how to rebel, jeer, and mock anything vaguely whiffing of authority. Within a year or two of arriving, a prisoner lost every scintilla of respect he might have had for the Party. Our disdain spread like gangrene, beginning with the guards, then slowly, inexorably, making its way up to the great leaders.

I think the camp also changed me psychologically. As a child I was outgoing and restless. When people meet me today, they find me reserved and somewhat distant. Growing up in the camp made me shut myself off from the world. I learned about suffering and hunger, violence and murder. For a long time I was angry at my grandfather. Only around 1983 did I begin to realize that not he but rather Kim Il-sung and his regime were the real causes of my suffering. They were the ones responsible for the camp and for filling it with innocent people. All during my childhood, Kim Il-sung had been like a god to me. A few years in the camp cured me of my faith. My fellow prisoners and I were the wayward sheep of the revolution, and the Party’s way of bringing us back into the fold was to exploit us unto death. The propaganda, which exalted North Korea as the people’s corner of paradise, now struck me as revolting.

THIRTEEN

PUBLIC EXECUTIONS AND POSTMORTEM STONINGS

Having reached majority—as defined in the camp—I was obliged to begin attending a ceremony I would have preferred to skip. Yet few things were optional at Yodok, least of all the things that were most awful. Many public executions had taken place over the preceding years of my internment, but as a child I was not allowed to see them. Two of my more curious friends had once sneaked into an execution and described it to me afterward. The story left me feeling hollow and disgusted, which is the way my father and uncle always looked when they came home from one of these events, their faces hard and unnatural. They would skip their dinner and just sit there, never saying a word about what they had seen. If I pressed, they just shook their heads, and observed that “Yodok is no place for human beings.”

The first public execution I saw was of a prisoner who had attempted to escape. We were dismissed from work early that afternoon so we could attend the execution. The whole village was there. The skies were rainy and gray—as I always remember them being on execution days. The event took place at a spot called Ipsok, a beautiful little elbow on the river, which turned into an island during the heavy rains. Ipsok means “large elevated boulder,” which is exactly what the spot was: an enormous rock, as big around as a house, standing by the shore.

Three desks were set up for the occasion: for the head of the camp, the village chief, and the military guards. As the prisoners arrived they took their seats on the ground in front of the desks. Farther off, a small truck was parked under a tree. I was told that that was where they were keeping the condemned man. I felt anxious. The older veterans sat chatting. A few wondered aloud about who the man might be. Most talked about other things. Several prisoners used the time to gather herbs. Attending a few executions was all it took to render the experience perfectly banal.