Free Escape from Camp 14 by Blaine Harden

cellmate to take his food.
Uncle ate some of it, but only until the boy’s appetite returned.
    In the meantime, Uncle went to work as Shin’s full-time nurse.
    He turned mealtimes into thrice-daily medical treatments, using a wooden spoon as a squeegee on Shin’s infected blisters.
    ‘There’s a lot of pus here,’ he told Shin. ‘I’m going to scrape it away, so bear with me.’
    He rubbed salty cabbage soup into the wounds as a disinfectant. He massaged Shin’s arms and legs so that his muscles would not atrophy. To prevent urine and faeces from coming into contact
with the boy’s wounds, he carried the cell’s chamber pot to Shin and hoisted him up so he could use it.
    Shin guesses that this intensive care went on for about two months. He had a sense that Uncle had done this kind of work before, judging from his competence and calm.
    On occasion, Shin and Uncle could hear the screams and moans of a prisoner being tortured. The room with the winch and the clubs seemed to be just down the corridor. Prison rules banned inmates
from talking. But in their cell, which was just large enough for Shin and Uncle to lie side by side, they could whisper. Shin discovered later that the guards knew about these conversations.
    Uncle seemed to Shin to have a special standing with the guards. They cut his hair and loaned him scissors so he could trim his beard. They brought him cups of water. They told him the time of
day when he asked. They gave him extra food, much of which he shared with Shin.
    ‘Kid, you have a lot of days to live,’ Uncle said. ‘They say the sun shines even on mouse holes.’
    The old man’s medical skills and caring words kept the boy alive. His fever waned, his mind cleared and his burns congealed into scars.
    It was Shin’s first exposure to sustained kindness and he was grateful beyond words, but he also found it puzzling. He had not trusted his mother to keep him from starving. At school, he
had trusted no one, with the possible exception of Hong Sung Jo, and informed on everyone. In return, he expected abuse and betrayal. In the cell, Uncle slowly reconfigured those expectations. The
old man said he was lonely and seemed genuinely happy to share his space and meals with someone else. He never once angered or frightened Shin or undermined his recovery.
    The routines of prison life following Shin’s interrogation and torture – discounting the screaming that periodically echoed down the prison corridor – were oddly
sustaining.
    Other than nursing the boy, Uncle was a man of leisure. He exercised daily in his cell. He cut Shin’s hair. He was an entertaining talker, whose knowledge of North Korea
thrilled Shin, especially when the subject was food.
    ‘Uncle, tell me a story,’ Shin would say.
    The old man described what food outside the fence looked, smelled and tasted like. Thanks to his loving descriptions of roasting pork, boiling chicken and eating clams at the seashore,
Shin’s appetite came back with a vengeance.
    As his health improved, the guards began to call him out of the cell. They were now very much aware that Shin had snitched on his family and they pressed him to inform on the old man.
    ‘You two are in there together,’ a guard said to Shin. ‘What does he say? Don’t conceal anything.’
    Back in the cell, Uncle wanted to know, ‘What did they ask you?’
    Squeezed between his nurse and his jailers, Shin elected to tell the truth to both sides. He told Uncle that the guards had asked him to be an informer. This did not surprise the old man. He
continued to entertain Shin with long stories about good things to eat, but he did not volunteer biographical information. He would not talk about his family. He expressed no opinions about the
government.
    Shin guessed – based on the way Uncle used language – that he had once been an important and well-educated man. But it was only a guess.
    Although it was a crime to talk about escaping from Camp 14, it was not