Free Escape from Camp 14 by Blaine Harden Page B

overseeing the execution began to speak. Shin’s mother and brother were dragged out.
    Shin had not seen them or heard anything about their fate since he walked out of his mother’s house on the night he betrayed them.
    ‘Execute Jang Hye Gyung and Shin He Geun, traitors of the people,’ the senior officer said.
    Shin looked at his father. He was weeping silently.
    The shame Shin feels about the executions has been compounded over the years by the lies he began telling in South Korea.
    ‘There is nothing in my life to compare with this burden,’ Shin told me on the day in California when he explained how and why he had misrepresented his past.
    But he was not ashamed on the day of the executions. He was angry. He hated his mother and brother with the savage clarity of a wronged and wounded adolescent.
    As he saw it, he had been tortured and nearly died, and his father had been crippled, because of their foolish, self-centred scheming. And only minutes before he saw them on the execution
grounds, Shin had believed he would be shot because of their recklessness.
    When guards dragged her to the gallows, Shin saw that his mother looked bloated. They forced her to stand on a wooden box, gagged her, tied her arms behind her back and tightened a noose around
her neck. They did not cover her swollen eyes.
    She scanned the crowd and found Shin. He refused to hold her gaze.
    When guards pulled away the box, she jerked about desperately. As he watched his mother struggle, Shin thought she deserved to die.
    Shin’s brother looked gaunt and frail as guards tied him to the wooden post. Three guards fired their rifles three times. Bullets snapped the rope that held his forehead to the pole. It
was a bloody, brain-splattered mess of a killing, a spectacle that sickened and frightened Shin. But he thought his brother, too, had deserved it.

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    Executions of parents for attempted escape were not uncommon in Camp 14. Shin witnessed several before and after his mother’s hanging. It wasn’t clear, though, what
happened to the children they left behind in the camp. As far as Shin could determine, none of these children was allowed to go to school.
    Except for him.
    Perhaps because he was a proven snitch, camp authorities sent him back to school. But his return wasn’t easy.
    Trouble started as soon as Shin walked from the execution grounds to his school, where he had a private meeting with his teacher. Shin had known this man for two years (although he never learned
his name) and regarded him as relatively fair-minded, at least by camp standards.
    At the meeting, though, the teacher was seething. He wanted to know why Shin had tipped off the school’s night guard about the escape plot.
    ‘Why didn’t you come to me first?’ he shouted.
    ‘I wanted to, but I couldn’t find you,’ Shin replied, explaining that it was late at night and the teachers’ compound was off-limits to prisoners.
    ‘You could have waited until the morning,’ the teacher said.
    The teacher had not received any credit from his superiors for uncovering the escape plot, and he blamed this miscarriage of justice on Shin, warning the boy that he would pay for his
thoughtlessness. When Shin’s class – about thirty-five students – assembled later in the classroom, the teacher pointed at Shin and shouted, ‘Come up front.
Kneel!’
    Shin knelt on the concrete floor for nearly six hours. When he wiggled to ease his discomfort, the teacher whacked him with a blackboard pointer.
    On his second day back at school, Shin walked with his class to a camp farm to gather corn straw and haul it to a threshing floor. Shin pulled an A-frame carrier loaded with straw. It was
relatively light work compared to pushing coal carts, but it required that he wear a kind of harness with a leather strap that chafed the tender scars on his lower back and tailbone.
    Soon, blood was oozing down his legs, soaking the pants of his school uniform.
    Shin dared not complain. His