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

Farm located in Mangyeongdae—Kim Il-sung’s birthplace—a horrendous mass murder of thirteen people took place. The incident came to public knowledge when a surgeon went to a marketplace to buy pork for his father’s birthday and found unusually fresh meat on the stands. But soon, because of his professional training, he was appalled to realize that what he was looking at was none other than human flesh. He asked the butcher for a price and found out that it was below the market rate. He bought one kilogram and headed straight to the police station, where he threw the meat on the chief’s desk and yelled at him.
    “You bastards, what have you been doing while an atrocity like this was happening in our town?” the surgeon shouted out.
    “What is this crazy fellow doing here throwing meat on the desk?” the chief of police yelled back.
    “Look carefully, filthy swine, what you are looking at is human flesh!”
    Only then did the police chief realize what he was looking at—that amorphous flesh, still exuding the fresh smell of blood. The ensuing investigation revealed that the entire family of the butcher was involved in the frantic cannibalistic spree, which was motivated by deep economic trouble. The family set up a stand in the farmer’s market in town and spotted rather stout peasants who were trying to sell sacks of rice. The wife approached these unsuspecting vendors to buy rice and told them to come to her house to receive payment. When she brought them to her place, located far away from the busy streets, her husband and brother would kill and butcher them with sharpened knives. The men would immediately take out fresh flesh and the wife brought it to the marketplace while the men burned the remaining body parts in a furnace. The team was caught after they had butchered their thirteenth victim. Those in the military in charge of security, including myself, knew about the incident soon after it happened from the criminal report.
    Unbelievable incidents of cannibalism are too numerous to list in their entirety, but the common theme among these events is that people will do unthinkable things when they are famished to death. People will turn into animals to survive. In the mining town of Bukchang in southern Pyeongan province, state food rations came to a halt in the late 1980s. Things turned really bad and many disappeared due to starvation by the early ’90s. A man in his sixties spent all day looking for grass and tree bark in the mountain foothills, gradually dying of exhaustion and hunger. But one day, he saw a burial ceremony in the mountains as he was leaning against a tree and eating bark. Later that night, he came back to the burial site, dug out the ground, opened the coffin, and dragged the corpse down to his hut. He marinated the dead person’s flesh and preserved it in a large jar. When the old man was caught, he was consuming the marinated flesh of the third corpse he had found. Another incident in Haeju in Hwanghae province involves an old woman who went mad and dipped her grandchild head first in a large pot of boiling water. Her daughter-in-law was out to beg for food while the mother-in-law was taking care of the infant. The grandma passed out when she heard the child scream, never to open her eyes again. It was springtime, which was the toughest season for people in the countryside—long before the new crops would yield a harvest and long after the last grain from the previous harvest had run out.
    In 1992, I was on the way to Jeongju on a business trip. As I was driving on an unpaved road in the countryside, dry dust rose along the sides. I saw a woman walking ahead of me, so I slowed down to avoid raising too much dust. As I drove by, I noticed that she was standing there, barely moving. She looked as if she was going to collapse in a minute. I stopped the car and offered her a ride, although this was against the company rule. She was covered in sweat smeared with dust and fatigue. Her