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

reddened eyes were completely covered with mucus. I asked her where she was from and where she was headed. The woman could barely talk due to exhaustion, but after a short break she told her story. Her husband was a worker in a chemical factory in Anju. They had two children, but as the food ration had halted, there was no way to survive in their hometown. So she and her husband each took a child and went in search of food. She was from the farming village of Jeongju, so she left the child at home and was on her way to town, hoping to find some food there. She has eaten nothing for three days and had no idea where the husband and the other child might be. I had some hard-boiled eggs that my wife had packed for me, so I offered her one. She took an egg in her palm but could not lift it to her mouth. Her arms were shaking so hard, as if they could not sustain the weight of an egg. When I dropped her on a small street of her hometown, I looked at her back, walking slowly toward her parents’ home. It was a half-demolished hut, and it did not look like the exhausted woman would get much there.
    But even before the conspicuous economic hardship began to leave macabre scars in the early 1990s, in April 1982, I witnessed a public execution of a fifty-year-old man in Nampo, a port city near Pyongyang. Back in 1982, the food-rationing program in North Korea was still functioning normally and people had not begun to suffer from starvation. Still, there were many people struck with hardship, especially in the countryside. The executed man worked for a collective farm where he supplied water. One day, when he was working on a plot of land near a mountain, he saw a young woman, a neighbor of his, climbing down the mountain with a large sack on her back. She worked for a shipyard in the same town. One of her supervisors was struggling with neuralgia, and she had heard that azalea brandy can relieve the pain. So she went to the mountains to gather flowers, of which there were plenty on the hills in April. But the man thought she was returning from work with a sack of rice, a food ration from her workplace. When he demanded the sack, the girl meekly replied in shock: “Ajeossi, 8 why would you want this sack?” She was so shocked that she could not continue talking. The desperate man raised a sickle to threaten her, but then he was seen by an elderly man of sixty-five years plowing the land down the hill.
    “You bastard, leave her alone, why would you want to kill her?” When the elderly man started yelling at him, the aggressor froze that moment, left the girl behind, and started to chase the man. But ironically, the fifty-year-old could not catch up with the sixty-five-year-old. The latter ran fast for his life and escaped the danger. The fifty-year-old returned to the hill where he had left the young woman. Even though she had had enough time to escape, she could not move an inch because of shock. She was still shivering and in a moment, fell under the swing of the sharp sickle. When the man lifted what he thought was a sack of rice, he was surprised by how light it was, as it was filled with flower petals. Now a murderer, the flustered man returned home, packed all his belongings, and became a fugitive at his sister’s, in the next village. There he was arrested, tried, and when the first snow fell in November, brought to an execution ground. I was in Nampo to transport glasses for my superior, K, then and happened to witness this man’s execution, where I heard all the details of his crime. In retrospect, 1982 seemed peaceful, but it could have been the very beginning of food crisis that prompted this man to murder a neighbor for what he believed was a sack of rice. The government made a public display of this case to establish law and order, but the majority of witnesses felt a very different sentiment than the one intended. As I remember, the people who gathered at the execution ground saw a dark cloud spreading over the fate of