Escape from North Korea: 'How I escaped horrors of life under Kim Jong-il'
Yeonmi Park, a young woman who fled North Korea after seeing friends and family tortured and killed, tells her harrowing story
By Tom Phillips
11:19AM BST 10 Oct 2014
Yeonmi Park was nine years old when she was invited to watch her best friend’s mother be shot.
Growing up in North Korea, Yeonmi had seen executions before. She remembers her mother piggy*backing her to public squares and sports stadiums to watch the spectacles used by Kim Jong-il’s Workers’ Party to silence even the slightest whisper of dissent.
But this killing lodged in her mind. Yeonmi watched in horror as the woman she knew was lined up alongside eight other prisoners and her sentence was read out. Her crime was having watched South Korean films and lending the DVDs to friends. Her punishment in this most paranoid of dictatorships was death by firing squad.
As the executioners raised their weapons, Yeonmi covered her face. But she looked up again, just in time to see an explosion of blood and the woman’s body crumple to the ground. ‘It was a shock,’ she remembers. ‘It was the first time I felt terrified.’
Yeonmi is recounting the horrific incident over a milkshake in Seoul, the ultra-modern capital of South Korea that is only 35 miles from the North Korean border but, with its luxury cars and 10-lane motorways, feels like another planet. Twelve years have passed since that day, and Yeonmi, now 21, is one of tens of thousands of North Korean defectors who have escaped one of the world’s most reclusive and repressive regimes.
Yeonmi has become a globetrotting activist intent on raising awareness about the plight of her people. She appears on South Korean television and uses Facebook, Twitter, Skype and WeChat to spread the word about the human rights abuses inside North Korea. She has travelled the world to talk about her experiences. And next month she will attend the annual One Young World Summit in Dublin, where she will appear alongside figures including Kofi Annan, Sir Bob Geldof, the former Mexican president Vicente Fox, and Dame Ellen MacArthur, the world record-breaking sailor.
Yeonmi was born on October 4 1993 in Hyesan, a notoriously cold river port along North Korea’s 850-mile northern border with China. The following year, on July 8, Kim Il-sung, the country’s 82-year-old founder and ‘Great Leader’, died of a heart attack. Hopes that he might have been ready to gradually open North Korea to the world evaporated as his son Kim Jong-il took power and set about transforming the hermit nation into a member of George W Bush’s notorious ‘axis of evil’.
Meanwhile, the economy was collapsing and the Great Famine, which would eventually claim up to 2.5 million lives, according to Andrew Natsios, the former head of USAID, was beginning to take hold. As Barbara Demick describes in Nothing to Envy, her definitive book on the period, those too young, too poor or too honest to find food quickly died. ‘The killer targets the most innocent, the people who would never steal food, lie, cheat, break the law or betray a friend.’
Yeonmi’s father was a mid-ranking civil servant and Workers’ Party member who worked at the Hyesan town hall. He kept his family afloat through an illegal sideline in selling gold, silver and nickel (which he had acquired through middle men in Pyongyang, the capital) to Chinese over the border. That income helped insulate his family from the worst of the suffering as North Korea was plunged into famine. But the bodies Yeonmi saw at the railway station: ragged, skeletal waifs collapsed on the pavement and slumped against walls, told her something was badly wrong. She caught a glimpse of corpses in the river, too. ‘I think they were trying to escape,’ Yeonmi says matter-of-factly. ‘But they didn’t succeed.’
Initially shielded from the effects of the famine, Yeonmi’s world started to disintegrate when, in 2002, her father was arrested for illegal trading. ‘Everything changed,’ she recalls. Yeonmi’s father was taken to a prison near Pyongyang and given a 17-year sentence. Her mother visited him once but that was enough to see the toll that the brutal torture had taken on her husband. He was beaten. Guards placed sticks between his fingers and crunched them together. He was made to sit in excruciating stress positions for interminable periods. Prisoners were deprived of water and food. ‘The environment was crazy. So many bugs and lice,’ Yeonmi says. ‘They treated them like animals. He was a really brilliant man. He was my hero, and the country just beat him. I couldn’t believe it.’
Yeonmi’s father was luckier than many North Koreans who were spirited off to the country’s Soviet-style gulags, never to return. According to a Human Rights Watch report in January this year, up to 120,000 political prisoners, among them children, are currently being held in secretive labour camps known in Korean as the kwan-li-so. Torture including ‘sleep deprivation, beatings with iron rods or sticks, kicking and slapping, and enforced sitting or standing for hours’, is routine, the group found.
After three years Yeonmi’s father managed to bribe his way out of jail. But by then he had been diagnosed with colon cancer. When Yeonmi saw him on his release, the once strapping figure had been transformed into a ghost of a man. ‘He had changed so much. He was so small. He spoke differently. I couldn’t believe it was my father,’ she says.
The Park family had been ruined by the imprisonment of Yeonmi’s father. Shortly after his arrest they were forced to move from a comfortable house in Hyesan to a minuscule apartment. After his release they almost immediately began plotting their escape into China to start a new life. But before the family could put its plan into action, Eunmi, Yeonmi’s 16-year-old sister, fled across the border with a friend without telling them. Terrified about how she might fare on her own, Yeonmi and her mother decided to follow her over the border and bring her home. Once reunited, the family would attempt a second escape altogether.