Escape From Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey From North Korea to Freedom in the West by Blaine Harden

Author:Blaine Harden
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, General, David_James Mobilism.org
ISBN: 9780230761186
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2012-03-17T04:00:00+00:00

PART TWO

14

Their plan was simple – and insanely optimistic.

Shin knew the camp. Park knew the world. Shin would get them over the fence. Park would lead them to China, where his uncle would give them shelter, money and assistance in travelling on to South Korea.

Shin was the first to suggest that they escape together. But before he broached the idea, he fretted for days, fearing that Park might be an informer, that he was being set up and that he would be executed like his mother and brother. Even after Park embraced the idea, Shin’s paranoia was difficult to shake: he had sold out his own mother; why shouldn’t Park sell him out?

Still, the escape plan, such as it was, went forward. Shin’s excitement overcame his fear. He would wake up in high spirits after a night of dreaming about grilled meat. Carrying sewing machines up and down factory stairs no longer wore him out. For the first time in his life, Shin had something to look forward to.

Since Park was under orders to follow Shin around, every working day became a marathon session of whispered escape preparations and motivational stories about the fine dining awaiting them in China. They decided that if guards discovered them at the fence, Park would take them out using tae kwon do. Although the guards carried automatic weapons, Shin and Park persuaded each other that their chances of not getting killed were good.

By any measure, these expectations were absurd. Just two people other than Shin are known to have escaped from any political prison camp in North Korea and made it to the West. One is Kim Yong, the former lieutenant colonel who had highly placed friends across North Korea. But he did not go over the fence. He escaped because of what he described as a ‘totally miraculous chance’. In 1999, during the government breakdown and the security lapses that marked the height of the North Korean famine, Kim hid under a metal panel wedged into the bottom of a dilapidated train car, which was being loaded with coal. When the train rolled out of Camp 18, so did Kim, who knew the countryside well and used his personal contacts at the border to find a safe way to cross into China.

Kim fled a prison that was not nearly as well guarded as the one where Shin and Park were planning their escape. As Kim wrote in his memoir, Long Road Home, he could never have escaped from Camp 14 because ‘the guards there acted as if they were on a war front’.1 Before Kim was transferred to the camp he eventually escaped from, he says he spent two years in Camp 14. He described the conditions there as ‘so severe that I could not even think of the possibility’ of flight.

The other escapee is Kim Hye Sook, who also fled Camp 18. Along with her family, she was first imprisoned in the camp in 1975, at the age of thirteen. Authorities released her in 2001, but later sent her back to the same camp.

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