Nicolas and I couldn’t stay for the final celebrations of the festival as we had to be back in Europe. Not that we expected any more surprises, what with the tour to Mount Myohyang looming ahead again.
We were wrong, however. Christian and Kay had been hanging around with the German television people from Moscow and through them had met a German emergency doctor by the name of Norbert Vollertsen. Vollertsen had been living in Pyongyang for a year-and-a-half, and knew much about the real situation in the country, having been active in hospitals outside the capital.
It was my last day in Pyongyang, and Vollertsen – a guy in his forties, tall, blonde and deeply tanned – was waiting for Christian, Kay and myself in the hotel bar. We simply sped off together in his white jeep, gangsta rap blaring from the speakers. “Where do you want to go?” Vollertsen asked. Without the official guides by our side, white-washing and hiding anything they didn’t want us to see, Pyongyang suddenly felt transformed.
Now we were able to get up close to the pyramid hotel, which was particularly ghastly, and travel to poor neighbourhoods, where the buildings might have been relatively new but of such shoddy quality that they were already close to collapse. Next we travelled to the quarters of the local high officials, mansions that could proudly stand alongside Lac Leman’s fines, but off-limits to regular people. We drove by many large groups of children preparing for the gymnastic display for the Party anniversary. According to Vollertsen, gymnastics display for the Party anniversary. According to Vollertsen, the children trained like this for up to six hours a day, and still had their regular school work to deal with.
Christian wanted to ride the subway – without Miss Choe and Miss Pak watching over him. All right, said Vollertsen, no problem. We hopped onto the escalator and rode down far beneath the city. Pyongyang has the deepest subway in the world – so deep in fact that it will supposedly provide shelter against nuclear attack. I was reiterating this fact to the others when suddenly Christian exclaimed, “Look who’s here!” I turned around and couldn’t believe what I saw: Miss Pak- right behind us! How did she get here? She asked Christian the same thing. “We’ve got a new guide,” I yelled over. “Don’t worry.”
Upon reaching the bottom of the escalator, she strongly urged us to turn around and travel back up again with her. No way. “Just jump onto the next train,” Vollertsen whispered.
“Don’t take a train!” Miss Pak implored us. “I have to meet someone!”
“Don’t worry,” I repeated. “Go ahead with your meeting. We’ve got a new guide.”
Of course, she jumped onto the train with us.
It was an old West Berlin train. The North Koreans had eliminated virtually every trace of its origins but there was no doubt about it- we knew Berlin trains. Pictures of Great Leaders one and two adorned every car, but the graffiti scratched into the windows by Berlin teenagers was still visible- to remove it would have meant replacing the glass. They don’t even do that in Berlin. I felt suddenly at home and said that I wouldn’t get off the train until it arrived at Kottbusser Tor. But we were on the wrong train. After one station, the ride was over- final station. We had to go back.
What to do now? We could get into serious trouble if we ignored the fact that Miss Pak was with us – and she would get into trouble, too. We decided to return to the hotel with her and head out again later that night, prowling the dark streets one last time.
With revolutionary music playing softly inside the Air Koryo plane, I took out the bundle of papers that Dr. Norbert Vollertsen had given to me – his reports to the headquarters of Cap Anamur, the aid organisation for which he worked.
A few short exceprts…In an entry dated December 2, 1999, Vollertsen had written:
“December in Korea. The wind is bitingly cold. The drive to Haehu can only be undertaken slowly and very carefully. Crashed trucks all over the roadside remind one of the treacherousness of the icy roads. And people – more on the way now than on some days during the height of summer – walking, by bicycle, with luggage sometimes larger than the person carrying it. This jackets and head scarves serve as little protection from the cold. Frost in their hair, everybody looks powdered white. We would need a car capable of carrying thousands to pick up all the people standing on the roadside, waving with packs of cigarettes and begging for a lift. After hours of useless waiting, most of them lie down on the ground, utterly disillusioned – if they haven’t already set the roadside slopes afire in order to get a little warmth. The hills around the towns and villages are barren. No trees in sight, every scrap of wood used to keep the fireplaces going. Winter in Korea. And this is just the beginning. Outside the hospital in Chaerjong, the local ‘ambulance’ is waiting- an ox cart loaded with straw. On top of it a thin garish blanket. Underneath the blanket a horribly pale, emaciated woman, her face etched in pain. She was ‘released’ from treatment – because there is no medicine left. The aid supplies are urgently required but are still sat in Sinuiju, on the North Korean-Chinese border, awaiting transportation. Eighteen-hundred – maybe as many as 2500 – train cars are just sitting there, most of them carrying aid supplies from a variety of aid organisations, ours amongst them. Almost all are labeled ‘high priority shipments’ – particularly those containing complete sets of furniture and cases of red wine for the officials of the numerous aid organisation at their ‘deprived outposts’. As with the red wine, the infusion medicines will suffer from the frost. One has only to explain this to the North Korean railway authority – and then track down the right train cars, secure electricity or diesel oil, hope for the best…
The worst however is this: nobody believes in the future anymore. In the hospitals, the pipes of the original central heating systems have been ripped out and are being used to hold up the plastic sheets in the green house. In places of the old heating system, holes are punched into walls adjoining primitive outdoor stoves, in order to allow at least a little warmth into the rooms. Buckets take the place of taps, filled with water from improvised wells. The water pipes have been ripped out and used as support material elsewhere. Nobody believes that the old city water-supply system will ever work again. Everywhere else in the world progress is being made, but here things slip backwards into the stone age – the hand-made axes of that era can already be seen occasionally here…”
Beijing. Reconnecting to the ‘real world’. My walk to the closest Internet café is much shorter than last year, one having since opened on Tiananmen Square, a stone’s throw from the Mao mausoleum.
Many thanks to Dr. Norbert Vollertsen, who was expelled from North Korea at the end of 2000 for exposing too many of the country’s dirty secrets to the Western press. He now resides in Seoul where he campaigns for the improvement of human rights in North Korea.
Nicolas Righetti would eventually publish a photo book about North Korea – Le Dernier Paradise (pub: Edition Olisane, Geneve, 2002) – that didn’t simply feature tourist snaps. Of course he could never admit that this had been his intention while being interrogated…
His fifty-minute video documentary, Guided Tour in North Korea, had its world premiere at the Calcutta Film Festival in spring 2002.
