The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag

by Chol-hwan Kang; Pierre Rigoulot

  All the meals and extra rations provided me by the rats gradually changed my view of these animals. I began to see them as useful, even precious, on a par with chickens and rabbits. I was truly grateful for their existence, and still am. Absurd though it may seem to those who have never known hunger, I actually felt a connection with them. I remember an encounter I had with a rat in our hut one night. Raising my head from my mattress I saw him staring at me from between two floorboards. We were locked in each other’s gaze, staring into each other’s eyes for what seemed a long time, until the spell broke and he scurried away. Before entering the camp, I had thought of rats as scary and disgusting. Today I think of them as touchingly kind animals.

  Sentiments aside, the following winter was a hard one, and the occasional rats I trapped afforded considerable succor. The snowfalls were so heavy that only the sharpest crags of the surrounding mountains broke through the thick blanket of white. It seemed as though nature were telling us that to get out of Yodok we would have to be the world’s greatest mountain climbers—a title none of us could claim.

  As long as the temperature remained above–13˚F, work went on as usual. Imagine us kids, dressed all in rags, trying to chop down a tree whose essential oils were needed for the latest “Let’s Earn Some Dollars for Kim Il-sung” campaign. With our bodies waistdeep in snow, we had to dig evacuation paths in case a tree didn’t fall as planned. Many adults were killed and maimed that way. Once a tree was down, we chopped off its branches and hauled the trunk to the foot of the mountain on our shoulders. At the end of the day, we returned to our huts—my, I almost said homes!—with our hands and feet frozen stiff and our whole bodies utterly exhausted.

  On one particularly cold winter’s day, I got home with a strange, painful stinging sensation in my feet. I tried soaking them in lukewarm water, but this only made them feel worse. Cold water was the only thing that brought relief. The next morning when I woke up, my toenails were solid black and I was unable to walk. The guards let me work inside that day, weaving wicker baskets as I had been taught in school. My toenails eventually fell off, but I miraculously escaped necrosis and the amputation it would have necessitated.

  New shoes were given to us every two years, but the quality was so poor, and our work so demanding, that the pair never lasted more than a year. To avoid frostbite, we wrapped our extremities in layers of rags and dried rat skins. In the bitterest cold, we swathed our heads and faces in tattered castoffs, leaving only our eyes uncovered. Such measures could never contend with the bitter–10˚F temperatures that descended on the mountain. The only way to keep from freezing was to keep moving; but this wasn’t something everyone could do, and every year, several old people died from the cold.

  These memories come back to me whenever I go skiing and see high, snow-covered mountains with sheer black crags. I try to explain my feelings to South Korean friends, but have little success. Where they see an ideal landscape, I see the natural barriers of Yodok, a place conceived for human misery, whose gloom still has the power to overwhelm me.

  ELEVEN

  MADNESS STALKS THE PRISONERS

  In the summer of 1982, my situation improved further. I finally made a friend. The camp had received two new prisoners, space aliens practically, whose extraordinary clothes and looks reminded us of our lost world. They were an elegant woman with dark glasses and her handsomely attired son, whose delicate white skin contrasted invidiously with our own, which the sun, wind, and snow had tanned into leather. Our jaws dropped when we saw them.

  Within a few months their finely cut clothes would lose all their charm. The woman stopped wearing her glasses; she and her son looked just like everybody else in the camp. Less than a year after their incarceration, the boy, whose name was Yi Sae-bong, fell seriously ill and couldn’t move his legs. Fortunately his paralysis didn’t last. At first we had a hard time communicating, because having grown up in Japan, he only knew a few words of Korean; but he learned the language quickly and was soon able to tell me how he arrived in Yodok. He was a little older than I was and his family had lived in Kyoto, the city with the most powerful Chosen Soren cell outside the homeland. When the Party leadership in Pyongyang chose Han Duk-su to head the Japanese wing, the Kyoto cell protested. Han Duk-su, they said, was being parachuted in; he had never done anything for the struggle in Japan. The opponents backed down when they learned Kim Il-sung himself was backing the controversial nomination, but by this time the Great Leader’s embittered candidate was determined to exact revenge. Many members of the Kyoto cell wound up in the camps. They had opposed the will of Han Duk-su and, by extension, that of Kim Il-sung, and this was a crime that could not be easily forgiven.

  Like so many who hadn’t understood the danger, Yi Sae-bong’s father decided to move his family back to North Korea. He planned to come first, then send for his wife, three sons, and daughter. Shortly after arriving, however, he was arrested for espionage and sent to a hard-labor camp. When weeks passed without a word, Yi Sae-bong and his mother came to North Korea to try to find out what had become of him. Instead of receiving information, they were arrested and sent to Yodok.

  I loved to hear Yi Sae-bong’s stories about Japan. I was amazed by all its brands of beer—imported from all over the world—and by the huge black American soldiers that walked the streets. My imagination soared at the mention of France, England, Germany, and Czechoslovakia—the latter inspiring particular wonder. What most sparked my interest were the thick, juicy steaks people ate with a knife and fork. I wanted to know how they were cooked, what they were garnished with, the side dishes that accompanied them. I was sad I couldn’t imagine the taste of catsup and offended by the rampant wastefulness, which included the lighthearted dumping of half-eaten meals. More shocking was my friend’s contention that grocers sold fruits the whole year round. I was almost ready to suspect him of lying. It was either that or believe that Japan really was a paradise—a possibility that, despite my father and uncle’s warm recollections, I still found difficult to admit.

  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 had stripped completely naked, picked all the fleas off our bodies, and crushed them with our fingernails. Whenever a case of typhoid fever was discovered, the sufferer was immediately transferred to a quarantine area and his entire village put under strict isolation. The village residents were then sent up into the mountains until the end of the disease’s incubation period. After that, the village was burned to the ground and rebuilt by the survivors.

  The quarantine area was divided into two wards, one for contagious patients, the other for psychiatric cases. In neither ward was medicine ever available. The patients simply waited for their illness to pass. If they died, that was just too bad. If they made it, they were sent back to work. The camp had many cases of madness, which put both the patients and their families at great risk. A mad person could say just about anything. If it was favorable to Kim Il-sung, nothing bad happened to the patient’s relatives. If, however, the comments were inappropriate, the patient and his family could pay with their lives. Madness struck young and old alike, the newly arrived and the veterans, as the climate of terror, scant food, and insufficient sleep put us all perpetually on the edge of delirium. Unbalanced prisoners had to work like everybody else, only their rations were made proportional to the amount of work they performed. If they worked a little, they had little to eat. If they didn’t work at all, they starved to death.

  I saw many fits of madness at the camp. One student had to leave school for a month after a severe beating by his teacher left him delirious. Another instance of madness happened to a good friend of mine, whose father had been Kim Il-sung’s history teacher as well as the national minister of education. The boy’s family arrived at the camp the same time we had, and he and I were in the same class. One day in the middle of a lesson he suddenly started raving, then stopped and broke into uncontrollable laughter. When I asked him what was so funny, he told me that the previous day his brother had given him something very delicious to eat. He glanced about with a strange look in his eye and made nonsensical replies to all our questions. Finally, the teacher sent him home. We didn’t see him again for six months. Then he was back, apparently sane, only more reserved and taciturn than we had previously known him to be.

  TWELVE

  BIWEEKLY CRITICISM AND SELF-CRITICISM

  In 1984, I turned fifteen. I was a scrawny kid, even by camp standards, but I had more stamina than most prisoners my age. I could walk briskly for hours with a heavy load, having come a long way since the time I passed out from carrying a log. No matter how much healthier the newly arrived kids may have looked, none could keep up with me. At Yodok, habit, training, and trickery counted more than strength. Arriving at the camp at the age I did left me plenty of time to develop these qualities.

  My stamina gradually won me the respect of my fellow prisoners. Even the guards—who weren’t exactly the accommodating type—never exerted extra effort to treat me like a “troublemaker” or make my life miserable.

  So do I dare admit it? Some mysterious bond had come to attach me to that place. I’ve heard it said that the most miserable slave is one who is content with his fate. That wasn’t my case; I wasn’t content. But Yodok was the big cage where I’d grown into adulthood and wised up to life’s tough realities. It was my cage—and though I was a hungry prisoner, draped in rags, I had learned to love the scents wafted by the springtime breeze, the tender green of the season’s first leaves, the last glow of pink in the evening sky as the sun sank behind the mountains. I could never look at those mountains, where I was sent to gather wild ginseng and other medicines with my friends, without being moved: I would recall the time we accidentally came nose to nose with a bear and had to hightail it down the mountain; the meal we made of a captured snake; the sweetness of the wild berries we picked. These were precious memories, of friendship and solidarity. These things were rare in Yodok, and I held them close. They gave me strength, unlike the old memories, whose return saddened me and sapped my strength. I hadn’t renounced the memory of my aquariums, but I now thought of them as belonging to another world, the abandoned world of Pyongyang; of my grandfather, who was condemned for being a “criminal”; of my mother, whom they’d kept back and forced to divorce my father; of Japan, as it had come alive in the stories of my uncle and father. This past had no place in my new life, which could accommodate no softheartedness, mine or anybody else’s.

  That’s how I gradually grew into adulthood, though as far as the camp was concerned, the transition happened all at once, with “The Last Class.”3 Our teacher had a pithy way of illustrating what that transition really meant: “Up to now,” he told us on the last day of school, “when you made a mistake, even a serious one, no one shot you for it. But from here on out, you’re responsible adults, and you could get shot. Consider yourselves warned.” While waiting for a death sentence to test the full extent of my new responsibility, the very next day I was allowed to taste the simple joys of adult life in Yodok: physical labor from morning until night, distended quotas, the occasional distribution of third-quality tobacco, public criticism and self-criticism sessions, and so forth.

  Criticism and self-criticism sessions were nothing new to me. Such meetings took place in every North Korean school, Yodok’s included. But outside the camp, these ideological exercises tended to be peaceable and rather formal in nature. Nothing much happened if you didn’t criticize well enough or happened to criticize too sharply. At Yodok, the stakes were much higher. Punishments consisted of hours of nighttime wood chopping, even for ten- and thirteen-year-old children.

  The atmosphere was strained. You could feel the fear and hatred spreading through the room. The kids were not as adept at controlling their emotions as adults, who knew that the wisest thing to do was accept whatever criticism they received. The adults understood that it was just a routine that had nothing to do with what their fellow prisoners really thought of them. Soon enough, the criticized person would have to criticize his criticizer. Those were the rules; there was nothing personal about it. Yet the faultfinding of peers was hard for kids to accept, especially if it struck them as unfair. They would get angry, argue, interrupt each other. While the short Wednesday meetings, which lasted only twenty minutes, were hardly long enough to cause major damage, the Saturday afternoon sessions, which went on for nearly two hours, were considerably more lively and tension-filled. A special session also could be called if something unusual took place in school. The substance o
f adults’ criticisms was basically the same as the children’s: “I wasn’t careful enough during work hours . . . I arrived late yesterday because I was being careless, etc. . . .” The major difference was that the children’s sessions were conducted among one’s classmates.

  As for the adults, each work team had its own location for Wednesday sessions, while on Saturday the different teams met together in a single large building, on whose walls hung the portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. At the far end of the room was a platform with a table where the prisoner sat to present his self-criticism. Next to the table stood two guards, along with a representative of the prisoners. There were no other chairs in the room. The other prisoners sat on the floor in groups of five, clustered with their fellow team members. The assembly hall was always overcrowded. Some prisoners dozed off, others became nauseous from the intensity of the body odor that hung in the air—there was no soap at Yodok.

  Sometimes we met in smaller groups to prepare our Saturday presentation in advance. Four of us would discuss our misdeeds for the week, while the fifth team member took notes. Afterward, the report was presented to a camp administrator, who selected the week’s ten most “interesting” cases for presentation before the entire village. The prelude to the ceremony varied somewhat, but the main action was always the same. The wrongdoer would step onto the platform, his head bowed, and launch into his self-criticism with a fool-proof formula such as, “Our Great Leader commanded us,” or “Our Dear Leader has taught us.” The offender then cited one of the head of state’s great “Thoughts,” relating either to culture, youth, work, or study, depending on the offense committed. A typical criticism went something like this:

  “At the famous conference of March 28, 1949, our Great Leader stated that our youth must always be the most energetic in the world, in terms both of work and study. But instead of heeding the wise reflections of our respected comrade Kim Il-sung, I twice arrived late at role call. I alone was responsible for this tardiness, which demonstrated neglect for the luminous reflection of our Great Leader. From now on, I will wake up a half hour earlier and make myself equal to the task of fulfilling his orders. I will renew myself and become a faithful warrior in the revolution of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il.”