Escape from Hell: To be a refugee from North Korea

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

Sun-ok Lee tells a similar story from her time in prison. She was ordered to a medical room to help with some record-keeping. Six pregnant women were there. "It was horrible to watch the prison doctor kicking the pregnant women with his boots. When a baby was born, the doctor shouted, 'Kill it quickly! How can a criminal in the prison expect to have a baby? Kill it!'" In the presence of the mothers, reports Lee, the babies' necks were squeezed until death came. Other witnesses to infanticide report that prison guards sometimes make the mothers themselves do the killing.

This was the kind of fate Kang dreaded when she learned of her brother's whereabouts in China, so she started to plan an escape. She knew of a local woman familiar with the human-trafficking networks that emerged during the famines of the 1990s. The hunger problem has eased slightly, but the exodus has only increased, because people have developed an effective underground railroad into northeast China. Some of its operators are Christian missionaries motivated by humanitarianism; most of the traffickers, however, just want to make money, and the woman Kang contacted was one of these. She agreed to help Kang get across, and Kang agreed to pay the debt with the income she would earn working in China.

And China is where refugees have to go, because North Koreans can't simply walk across the border into South Korea. The DMZ separating the two countries is one of the most militarized places on the planet. Even if all the troops were to leave, the huge number of landmines would make it a perilous crossing. For most North Koreans, then, escape means passage into China across a cold river patrolled by border guards. There are bribes to be paid and eyes to be averted. The Tumen River dividing North Korea and China isn't especially broad or deep and may be waded at many points, but its waters are frigid. As one refugee told Human Rights Watch, "I endured the coldness, even though it was as painful as cutting my flesh with a knife." Many refugees prefer to cross in the winter, when the river freezes.

That was Kang's plan, and it seemed a good one for the month of December. But the ice was thin, and it cracked beneath her feet. Kang and her companion, the trafficker, splashed into the water. Border guards heard the commotion and started yelling at them to come back. Kang was confused; these men were supposed to have been paid off. "Ignore them," shouted her guide. "Just keep going." Kang pressed on in the cold. Shots rang out, but she continued forward. "Somehow, we made it to the other side," she says.

For many refugees, getting out of North Korea is the easy part, because China is no safe haven for them. Helie Lee, the Korean-American author of the best-selling book Still Life with Rice, said in Senate testimony last year that a bribe of about $400 was enough to get nine of her kin past the border guards -- but getting them out of China was so perilous that each of them carried enough rat poison to commit suicide. (Lee describes their difficulties in a more recent book, In the Absence of Sun.)