Long Road Home: Testimony of a North Korean Camp Survivor by Yong Kim, Suk-Young Kim Page B

detainees suffering from physical torture, solitary confinement, and nervous breakdown, but I never had a chance to talk to them. The guards were watching us all the time. At some moments when I was not being tortured, I thought of committing suicide, but there was simply no way. Guards were watching detainees everywhere around the clock, so there was hardly any moment of privacy. At other times, I still kept wondering how the party could suspect me of treason; even if my biological parents were criminals, I had grown up in the state-run orphanage under the care of our Great Leader, been adopted by highly regarded party members, and served the country all my life. At still other times, when I was suffering in delirium during torture, I saw the floating images of public executions I’d either witnessed or heard about. The macabre final moments had a powerful effect on all witnesses, as the condemned person gasped for his final breath in this world. At that time, I certainly believed that the executed deserved their punishments and our homeland would be a better place without them. Could I have been wrong? Now that the possibility of my own execution loomed large, I started to wonder if there were others like me on death row who couldn’t make any sense of what was happening to them. Sitting on the hard cement floor of my cell, I heard jailors talk among themselves about the various reasons the prisoners had ended up at the Maram detention center. I soon learned that most of them were held on charges of espionage. In retrospect, it was the time when Kim Jong-il was launching a massive revolutionary struggle to consolidate his position as the rightful heir to his father, Kim Il-sung. The campaign aimed at creating fear and subsequent obedience among the people who doubted Kim Jong-il’s leadership. The regime probably saw my case as serving their purpose—to create terror and disperse any challenges to Kim Jong-il’s rise. Whether I really was a spy or not would not have mattered that much. But all I could see then was the single fact that the charges brought against me were unjust, and I still hoped for clemency once I had a chance to explain myself to the authorities. I completely underestimated the regime’s emphasis on blood lines and family background, according to which I was only an imposter trying to disguise my true identity and pass as the loyal guard of Kim Jong-il. But I wanted to yell out to them that I had been living a flawless life marked by selfless dedication, and that I deserved a chance to prove it to my beloved country.
Hell on Earth
    As time went by at the detention center, I came to believe that I would certainly be shot to death. This conviction increased as the vice-director of the center came to my cell on a regular basis and yelled at me:
    “You filthy son of a bitch, you bastard from a cursed line of American spies. Whether you tell us or not, it’s clear to everyone that you’ve betrayed us. So you’d better tell us the whole story to end this stupid game of silence.”
    I was on the verge of giving up hope that I would be released alive from the center when the door of my cell opened in the middle of the night.
    “Come out, you filthy animal.”
    The vice-director was standing in front of me with a guard on each side. Having been confined in a tiny cell for what seemed like eternity, I could not stand on my feet. Two guards dragged me to a courtyard where a Soviet-made minitruck was parked. They put chains around my wrists and ankles and dragged me into the back of the truck, of which all four sides were covered. Two armed guards sat next to me. They made me lower my head to the floor and I could not see a thing. I was the only detainee riding in the back of the truck. The engine started and the truck moved. I had traveled all over North Korea on business trips, so I could have figured out where the car was headed had I been able to see out the window. But it was completely dark. I felt