The Reluctant Communist by Charles Robert Jenkins, Jim Frederick Page B

guards would bring work details of ten or twelve people at a time to dig sand for cement. The prisoners dressed in rags, got almost no food, and received brutal physical abuse from the guards. Guards would make the prisoners line up on their knees and kowtow to them to receive a single cigarette. Then the guards would hand them a cigarette and a single match. If they could not light the cigarette off of one match strike (and North Korean matches are horrible), then they just blew their chance for the day. But this passed for easy time in North Korea. This prison was not for the worst offenders. It was for people who had, say, fought with a work team leader or expressed doubt about the government (as opposed to criticizing it). The people there could reasonably expect to be released someday after their ideological reeducation was deemed a success.
    Often we would head down to the work site to see if the guards had any kerosene, gasoline, or cigarettes they were willing to barter. On New Year’s Day of 1971, we headed down there to see if they had anything new. Since it was a holiday, the mediumsentence prisoners were given a rare day off, so the guards filled the work detail with harder-luck, long-term inmates who were in for serious crimes against the government, like trying to escape North Korea or criticizing the government. Crimes like that were usually given a fifteen-year sentence, but the work was so brutal, it was as good as a death sentence, and everybody knew it. All four of us were heading up the riverbank when one of the guards we knew started blowing a whistle while he turned to us and waved us away. At the same time, we saw one of the prisoners running the other direction. We headed back toward home double time, but not before we heard a rifle shot ring out and saw two more guards head slowly in the direction the inmate had headed. The next day, with the regular prisoners digging as usual, we came back to the guard and asked him what happened. “He was making a run for it,” said the guard, “so we stopped him.” “Did you take him to the hospital?” we asked. “The hospital?” he laughed. “Hell, no.” “What did you do to him?” we asked. “We took him back to the prison and made him dig his own grave,” he said. “Then we shot him.”
    In 1971, some cadres showed up unexpectedly at our house with two Japanese men. I think the first one’s name was Osada. He was stocky like a welder and had gold teeth. The second one’s name I do not know. The cadres told us that these Japanese were going to live there from now on. None of us were too excited about that, not because we didn’t like them—we didn’t know them—but because of the crowding. That night, the Japanese told us they were on a merchant ship bound for South Korea when they encountered engine trouble. So they got into a smaller boat to go for help while the rest of the crew radioed in. But, they told us, their smaller boat’s engine went out, so they drifted for a few days, and when they hit land, they were in North Korea, not South, and the Organization, believing them to be spies, wouldn’t let them out.
    The next day, however, there had been some change of plans. Maybe the Organization decided us mixing together wasn’t such a good idea after all, since leaders showed up and carted the two Japanese men away. We never saw them again. Their story sounded pretty suspicious to us, too, and we Americans concluded they were probably spies of one sort or another, but on whose side, we had no idea.
    Toward the end of 1971 and beginning of 1972, the cadres really stepped up our studies. They told us if we studied hard, they would give us our own houses, real jobs, an opportunity to fraternize with women, all of these things. We couldn’t care less about the citizenship—in fact, none of us wanted it—but women, houses, and a “normal” life (which itself is something of a joke in North Korea), those seemed like things worth working