Escape from Hell: To be a refugee from North Korea

National Review, Jan 27, 2003 by John J. Miller

Kang Kil-Ok knew she had to flee North Korea after security guards beat her 61-year-old mother so badly that the old lady couldn't walk.

It was the summer of 1997. Kang's brother and his family had vanished. One suspicion was that the regime of dictator Kim Jong Il had taken them away, to a prison camp or some other terrible fate, for a crime they may or may not have committed. With government officials quizzing the relatives, however, the disappearance could really mean only a single thing: The family had fled to China, and the agents wanted to track them down.

They figured Kang's mother would know something, and they were determined to beat it out of her. "After the interrogation, my mother's knees were so badly bruised, she couldn't even stand up. They kicked her with boots and whacked her with sticks," says Kang. Her mother died a few months later. "How could they do such a thing to a 61-year-old woman? It made me realize that I had to leave North Korea, too."

And that's what Kang did, in a four-year ordeal that had her crossing the border under gunfire, resisting pressure to become a prostitute, accepting a sham marriage to hide from Chinese police, and finally escaping to freedom in South Korea. Parts of her story are hardly unique -- indeed, they are disturbingly common -- but they also illuminate the horrible reality of North Korea, as well as the dangers North Korean refugees face in China, where the government is committed to rounding them up and returning them to a country whose penal code lists defection as a capital crime.

Nobody knows how many North Koreans have tried to escape from the shackles of Kim Jong Il's totalitarianism, but some estimates put the number of North Korean refugees now hiding in China as high as 300,000. They've fled from a ruthless machine of political terror, and from a failed system of economics that has starved 2 million people to death - - out of a population totaling 22 million -- and left many more malnourished. Very few of these refugees have made it out of both North Korea and China. But those who have escaped have riveting stories to tell, as they bear witness to life and death under what may be the world's most oppressive government and its Chinese ally.

Kang Kil-Ok is now 32, and lives in Seoul. Her interview with NR, conducted by phone and with a translator, is the first she's given anywhere. Yet even now she can't operate outside the long reach of Kim Jong Il; under North Korea's collectivist philosophy, whole families may be punished for the alleged crimes of individual members. This form of social control stops many North Korean defectors from telling their stories at all, and keeps others from revealing their true identities when they do. "Kang," therefore, is an alias.

"After they tried to make an example of my mother, everything changed. People started keeping their distance. My boyfriend stopped seeing me," says Kang. She worked long hours at a gunpowder plant, lived in a dormitory building, and often lacked food. "I became very depressed." She also learned for certain that her brother had taken his family to China -- he sent her a letter that included details on how to contact him if she were to make it out as well. "I couldn't wait any longer. If the government found out that I knew he was in China and hadn't told them, I would be thrown into a prison camp."

This was something to avoid at all costs. The stories from North Korean prison camps, as recounted by the handful of survivors who have managed to escape them, rival the stories from Nazi concentration camps and the Soviet Gulag. One of these survivors, Sun-ok Lee, testified at a congressional hearing last May. She had once run a government supply office in North Korea, but was accused of embezzlement and sentenced to prison. The days were full of hard labor, and even the nights brought no relief: "Some 80 to 90 prisoners sleep in a flea-infested chamber about six meters long by five meters wide (about 19 feet by 16 feet). . . . The prison chamber is so congested that sleeping there is itself a torture."

Prisoners charged with additional crimes, such as failing to meet work quotas or not memorizing the president's New Year message, are confined in "punishment cells" -- spaces so small it's impossible to stand up or lie down. The cells are so awful, reported Lee, that "it is a day of great fortune if a prisoner finds a rat creeping up from the bottom of the toilet hole. The prisoners catch it with their bare hands and devour it raw, as rats are the only source of meat in the prison." But they have to do their rat feasting on the sly: Getting caught lengthens their sentences.

The testimonies of prison-camp survivors are full of such wretched tales; among the worst are those dealing with pregnant women. Young-Hwa Choi, a North Korean who made it to Seoul last March, recently told a rapt audience at the American Enterprise Institute about a woman she knew in prison. Her friend had fled to China and become pregnant, but then was caught by the police and repatriated to North Korea, which promptly threw her into prison. As she approached her due date, she was taken to a hospital; Choi was allowed to accompany her. Choi tells what happened next: "They put a towel on the face of the baby right after birth, right before the mother. They said, 'Any Chinese seeds have to be eliminated.'"