Escape from Camp 14 (14 page)

Their relationship, always distant, had grown colder still. Shin, on the few days when he did not have to work on the farm or in the factory, had rarely taken advantage of camp rules that
allowed him to visit. Spending time with his father had become an ordeal.

What made Shin so angry with his father was not clear, at least not to Shin. It was his mother, not his father, who had put his life at risk by plotting an escape when he was thirteen. She and
Shin’s brother were the ones who had been complicit in starting a chain of events that resulted in his arrest, torture and abuse from other students in secondary school. His father had been
another victim.

But his father was alive and attempting a reconciliation with Shin. By the unforgiving calculus of relations between distant fathers and resentful sons, that was reason enough for Shin’s
loathing.

They shared a sullen New Year’s supper in a cafeteria at his father’s work site, eating cornmeal and cabbage soup. Shin made no reference to his escape plan. He had told himself, as
he walked to see his father, that any show of emotions, any hint of final leave-taking, could imperil the escape. He did not completely trust him.

His father had tried, after the killing of his wife and eldest son, to be more attentive. He had apologized for being a bad parent and for having exposed the boy to the camp’s savagery. He
had even encouraged his son, if he ever got the chance, to ‘see what the world is like’. That lukewarm escape endorsement may have been blandly worded because Shin’s father did
not completely trust his son either.

After Shin was assigned to the garment factory, where opportunities to find or steal extra food were particularly meagre, his father had gone to the extraordinary trouble of obtaining some rice
flour and sending it to his son as a paternal offering.

When they sat together in the cafeteria, neither mentioned the gift, and when Shin left that evening, there was no special goodbye. He expected that when the guards learned of his escape, they
would come for his father and take him back to the underground prison. He was almost certain that his father did not know what was coming.

Early the next morning, a foreman from the garment factory herded Shin, Park and about twenty-five other prisoners up the mountain. They set to work near the top of a
twelve-hundred-foot slope. The sky was clear and the sun shone brightly on a heavy snow pack, but it was cold and the wind was blowing. Some prisoners used small axes to hack the branches off
logged trees, while others stacked wood.

The firewood detail was an extraordinary stroke of good luck as it placed Shin and Park within a stone’s throw of the fence that ran along the spine of the mountain. On the far side of
that fence, the terrain canted steeply down, but it was not too steep to be traversed by foot. Not far beyond the fence there was tree cover.

A guard tower rose from the fence line about a quarter of a mile to the north of where the prisoners chopped wood. Guards walking two abreast patrolled the inside perimeter of the fence. Shin
noticed lengthy intervals between patrols.

The foreman in charge of the work crew was also a prisoner and therefore unarmed. In the intervals between guard patrols, there was no one close who could fire a weapon at Shin and Park. They
had decided earlier that they would bide their time until dusk, when it would be more difficult for guards to track their footsteps in the snow.

As Shin worked and waited, he brooded about how the other prisoners were oblivious to the fence and the opportunities that lay beyond it. They were like cows, he thought, with a cud-chewing
passivity, resigned to their no-exit lives. He had been like them until he met Park.

At around four o’clock, with light draining out of the day, Shin and Park sidled towards the fence, trimming trees as they moved. No one seemed to notice.

Shin soon found himself facing the fence, which was about ten feet high. There was a knee-high berm of snow directly in front of him and then a trail where patrolling guards had tramped it down.
Beyond that was a groomed strip of sand, which showed footprint tracks if someone stepped on it. And beyond that was the fence itself, which consisted of seven or eight strands of high-voltage
barbed wire, spaced about a foot apart, strung between tall poles.

According to Kwon Hyuk, a defector who worked as a manager at Camp 22, the fences that surround some of the labour camps in North Korea include moats with spikes designed to impale anyone who
falls in. Shin saw no moat and no spikes.

He and Park had told each other that if they could get through the fence without touching the wires, they would be fine. As to how they might be able to do that, they were not sure. Yet as the
hour of the escape drew nearer, Shin surprised himself by not feeling afraid.

Park, though, was distracted.

After guards had passed along the fence as part of their late-afternoon patrol, Shin heard fear in Park’s voice.

‘I don’t know if I can do this,’ he whispered. ‘Can’t we try it some other time?’

‘What are you talking about,’ Shin said. ‘If we don’t do it now, there won’t be another chance.’

Shin feared it would be months, even years, before they would be allowed outside the factory at dusk near a section of fence that could not be seen from a guard tower.

He could not – would not – endure more waiting.

‘Let’s run!’ he yelled.

He grabbed Park’s hand and pulled him towards the fence. For an agonizing second or two, Shin had to drag the man who had inspired his desire to escape. Soon, though, Park began to
run.

Their plan had been for Shin to stay in the lead until they got clear of the fence, but he slipped and fell to his knees on the icy patrol trail. As a result, Park was first to the fence.
Falling to his knees, he shoved his arms, head and shoulders between the two lowest strands of wire.

Seconds later, Shin saw sparks and smelled burning flesh.

Most electric fences built for security purposes repel trespassers with a painful but exceedingly brief pulse of current. They are not designed to kill, but to frighten animals and people.
Lethal electric fences, however, use a continuous current that can make a person lock on to the wire as voltage causes involuntary muscle contractions, paralysis and death.

Before Shin could get to his feet, Park had stopped moving. He may already have been dead. But the weight of his body pulled down the bottom strand of wire, pinning it against the snowy ground
and creating a small gap in the fence.

Without hesitation, Shin crawled over his friend’s body, using it as a kind of insulating pad. As he squirmed through the fence, Shin could feel the current. The soles of his feet felt as
though needles were stabbing them.

Shin was nearly through the fence when his lower legs slipped off Park’s torso and came into direct contact, through the two pairs of pants he was wearing, with the bottom strand. Voltage
from the wire caused severe burns from his ankles to his knees and the wounds bled for weeks, although it would be a couple of hours before Shin noticed how badly he had been injured.

The human body is unpredictable when it comes to conducting electricity. For reasons that are not well understood, the ability of individuals to sustain and survive a
high-voltage shock varies widely. It is not a matter of build or fitness. Stout people show no greater resistance than skinny ones.

Human skin can be a relatively good insulator, if it is dry. Cold weather closes skin pores, reducing conductivity. Multiple layers of clothing can also help. Conversely, sweaty hands and wet
clothes can easily defeat the skin’s natural resistance to an electric current. Once high-voltage electricity penetrates a body that is well grounded (wet shoes on snowy ground), the liquids
and salts in the blood, muscle and bone are excellent conductors. Wet people holding hands have died of electrocution together.

Shin’s success in crawling through an electric fence designed to kill seems to have been a function of luck. His was astoundingly good; Park’s was terrible. If Shin had not slipped
in the snow, he would have reached the fence first and probably died.

Shin did not know it, but to pass safely through the fence he needed a device that could shunt the flow of current from the fence to the ground. Park’s body, lying on damp ground on top of
the bottom strand of wire, became that device.

When he cleared the fence, Shin had no idea where to go. At the crest of the mountain, the only direction he could comprehend was down. At first, he weaved through a patch of trees. But within
minutes, he was out in the open, stumbling across upland fields and pastures that were sporadically lit by a half moon showing through clouds.

He ran for about two hours, always heading downhill, until he entered a mountain valley where there were barns and scattered houses. He heard no alarms, no gunfire, no shouting. As far as he
could tell, no one was chasing him.

As the adrenaline of flight began to ebb, Shin noticed that the legs of his pants were sticky. He rolled them up, saw blood oozing out of his legs and began to comprehend the severity of his
burns. His feet, too, were bleeding. He had stepped on nails, apparently, when he was close to the camp fence. It was very cold, well below 10 degrees Fahrenheit, and he had no coat.

Park, dead on the fence, had not told him where he might find China.

Racing downhill in the early evening darkness through cornfield stubble, Shin came across a farmer’s shed half buried in the hillside. The door was locked. There were no
houses nearby, so he broke the lock with an axe handle he found on the ground.

Just inside the door, he discovered three ears of dried corn and devoured them. The corn made him aware of how hungry he was. Helped by the moonlight, he searched the shed for something else to
eat. Instead, he spotted an old pair of cotton shoes and a worn military uniform.

Uniforms are everywhere in North Korea, the world’s most militarized society. Conscription is almost universal. Men serve ten years, women seven. With more than a million troops on active
duty, about five per cent of the country’s population is in uniform, compared with about half a per cent in the United States. An additional five million people serve in the army reserve for
much of their adult lives. The army is ‘the people, the state and the party’, says the government, which no longer describes itself as a communist state. Its guiding principle,
according to the constitution, is ‘military first’. Uniformed soldiers dig clams and launch missiles, pick apples and build irrigation canals, market mushrooms and supervise the export
of knock-off Nintendo games.

Inevitably, uniforms wind up in barns and sheds.

The military pants and shirt that Shin found were far too big for him, as were the cotton shoes. But finding a change of clothes less than three hours after escaping the camp and before anyone
could get a look at him was an extraordinary stroke of luck.

He stepped out of his cold wet shoes and removed both pairs of prison trousers. From the knees down they were stiff with blood and snow. He tried to bandage the burns on his legs with ripped-out
pages from a book he found in the shed. The pages stuck to his mangled shins. He put on the ratty, too-big uniform and slipped his feet into the cotton shoes.

No longer instantly recognizable as a runaway prisoner, he had become just another ill-clothed, ill-shod and ill-nourished North Korean. In a country where a third of the population is
chronically malnourished, where local markets and train stations are crowded with filthy itinerant traders, and where almost everyone has served in the army, Shin blended in easily.

Outside the shed, he also found a road, and he followed it down into a village at the bottom of the valley. There, to his surprise, he saw the Taedong River.

For all his running, he was only two miles upstream from Camp 14.

News of his escape had not reached the village. The streets were dark and empty. Shin crossed a bridge over the Taedong and headed east on a road parallel to the river. He hid from headlights
when a single car drove by, then he climbed up to a railroad track that seemed deserted and kept walking.

By late evening, he had walked about six miles and entered the outskirts of Bukchang, a coal town just south of the river with a population of about ten thousand people. A few pedestrians were
out, but Shin did not sense that his presence warranted special attention. With an aluminum factory, coal mines and a large power plant, the town was perhaps accustomed to night-shift workers
walking the streets at all hours.

Shin saw a pigpen, a familiar and comforting sight. He crawled over a fence, found some rice straw and dug in for the night.

For the next two days, Shin scavenged around the outskirts of Bukchang, eating whatever he could find on the ground or in garbage heaps. He had no idea what to do or where to
go. People in the street seemed to ignore him. His legs hurt and he was hungry and cold, yet he was exhilarated. He felt like an alien fallen to earth.

In the months and years ahead, Shin would discover all things modern: streaming video, blogs and international air travel. Therapists and career counsellors would advise him. Preachers would
show him how to pray to Jesus Christ. Friends would teach him how to brush his teeth, use a debit card and fool around with a smartphone. From obsessive reading online, the politics, history and
geography of the two Koreas, China, Southeast Asia, Europe and the United States would all become familiar.

None of this, though, did more to change his understanding of how the world works, and how human beings interact with each other, than his first days outside the camp.

It shocked him to see North Koreans going about their daily lives without having to take orders from guards. When they had the temerity to laugh together in the streets, wear brightly coloured
clothes or haggle over prices in an open-air market, he expected armed men to step in, knock heads and stop the nonsense.