Count the Years of Imprisonment by the Number of Toes

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Of course “release” is possible at the North Korean gulags too. Because release is possible some of the former prisoners have defected to South Korea. They were at the “Revolutionize Area,” Yoduk #15, which is the only revolutionize area among the gulags in North Korea. The rest are the “Completely Restricted Areas” from which the prisoners can only be released by death.

Although gulags in North Korea vary according to characteristics and location, the common variable among them is that prisoners cannot escape from heavy labor until the moment of their death. There is no way to escape it. In order to not die (literally it is not “to survive” but “to not die”), prisoners are forced to work from dawn to night.

Furthermore, since the camps are located in such remote mountainous areas, the weather is very cold not only in winter but in spring and fall; however, prisoners never receive adequate clothing. It is highly questionable how people can survive under such conditions but since human instinct for survival is beyond our imagination, there are people who survive through for decades.

Labor Ends Only by Death

In the gulag, whether one is a child, a senior, handicapped or mentally ill, he has to do forced labor from early dawn to later night. Even those who have become mentally ill due to the harsh labor are still forced to work, and the method to control them is food. Although they had become mad, since their human instinct still remains, they do simple work in order to survive.

Forced labor includes various kinds of work such as coal extraction, different kinds of constructions, logging, plant extraction (picking), rock extraction, rabbit-breeding, natural mushroom picking, wash for gold, and beer (or other alcoholic beverages) breeding. It is quite common for a prisoner (the actual “criminal”) to work at a mine for his entire life and if he has a family, his family members work in different fields. A gulag can accommodate about 20,000 people, thus there is everything in a gulag just as an average society.

The prisoners who obey the guards well or spies (among the prisoners) are sometimes sent to relatively more comfortable places, which are rabbit-breeding farms or breweries.

However, if a rabbit dies, the prisoner who was in charge is punished, beat up and expelled to harsher jobs. When a more valuable animal such as a cow dies, the prisoner is taken to a detention room or sometimes beat up to death. Despite such danger, because the level of forced labor is so harsh and since they can always pick on animal food, prisoners always envy for such a position. Of course a prisoner is punished to death if he is discovered to have stolen animal food.

Although corruption prevails in every part of the society in North Korea, especially in the detention camps, guards make life of the prisoners miserable through something called “liberalism.” What they mean by “liberalism” is the act of the guards hoard secretly the food out of what the prisoners have collected just enough to keep themselves alive.

Although there are some cases where guards extort from prisoners, they usually hoard secretly in a structured way. For this reason high level officials from the Security Department frequently check, but except for very special cases, guards are almost never caught.

Vegetables, chili paste, soy paste, livestock and food, shoes and bicycles produced in gulags are sold at high price in the farmer’s markets (jangmadang) because they are of best quality domestic products. The fact that forced labor from of the gulags take up a significant part of the North Korean economy is one of the reasons why the government of North Korea maintains stable number of prisoners in the gulags even with false sentences.

Competition to Take the Clothes of the Dead

There is no way to obtain clothes in gulags. Not only because clothes are easily worn out due to the harsh labor in the mountainous areas, but because there is no way for them to obtain new clothes, they have no choice but to sew their clothes tens of hundred times. For this reason when a prisoner dies, other prisoners fiercely compete each other to take off the clothes of the dead.

Perhaps the readers may think this is too inhumane but they cannot help it. They do it for survival since it is a very remote mountainous region where the temperature fall below zero degrees (Celsius) even in the spring and the fall. Even in summer, they say they feel cold which makes them shiver, so they wear clothes in thick layers.
They provide “work shoes” once in a year and half in case of Yoduk facility, and cottoned winter shoes once in five years, but due to the harsh labor the shoes are rapidly worn out. For this reason, they patch over their shoes with rabbit leather or pig leather tied with thin straw ropes or make shoes out of robber belts cut off from wasted tires.

However, even with those substitute shoes, most of the prisoners lose their toes because of frost bites. For this reason people can read the length of imprisonment of a prisoner by the number of toes he has.

In a situation like this, women in menstrual period do not have pieces of clothes to over up, so they let blood absorbed on their pants. Since this is such a common scene, people do not feel embarrassed about it, as former prisoner defectors testified.

Average Height of an Adult 150cm (5’), Increase of Load of Work

Even in the gulags there are schools. The people’s school (elementary education) is four years and high-middle school is five years. They are called school, but the classes consist of work such as picking plants to feed rabbits, wash for gold, moving rocks, logging, farming on the guards’ farms.

Children go to school at 6 am, and spend the day doing the work ordered by the “teachers” (security guards), but the level of work for the children to meet daily is very high. Just as the adults are treated, when the children do not complete the work ordered for the day, they are beaten and not given food, so children work until late at night.

There is no difference even if a child grades up to the high-middle school, only that the amount of work is much higher. Perhaps another difference may be that the children are much more cunning than those in the people’s school. Since the children who are in the most growing stage cannot eat much, all they think about is food. However, because they barely have anything to eat, the average height of seventeen years old who are now given the same amount of work as adults barely reaches150cm (5’00’’).

It is difficult to expect the children brought to the gulag when they are little to have normal mentality. Without knowing why they are put into such a situation, they do not know about other kinds of human society but only live like animals, entirely relying on their instinct.

Killing Both the Baby and the Mother

Family relations in the detention camps vary from camp to camp. In the Yoduk #15, prisoners can live in families. They say it is better to live with the family members because they can console each other. However, among them, there are families who let the father starve to death because they have been sent to gulag because of his crime.

The very persons who committed crimes suffer from guilt for having their family members taken to the gulag with them, and sometimes they commit suicide. However, in general, family members comfort each other, and help each other to survive.

It is prohibited to give birth to a child in a camp. Of course, sexual intercourse is only allowed for married couples.

However, it is an unavoidable human nature to want to protect their family lines so there are some cases where they try to give birth to a child in secret. In most cases, their efforts become in vain and both the baby and the mother die. Especially in the detention camps, the girls become mere play things of the prison guards and due to the low level of ethics, all the girls know to do is taking their clothes off in front of men, testify the former prisoner defectors of the gulag.

Furthermore, prisoners often commit incest. Some get punished caught on the spot. The former gulag prisoner defector, Ahn Myung Chul testifies, “(prisoners are) emaciated for not having ate for so long, left with only skeletons, hardly take a bath once a year, rarely brush teeth, even them who live with lies walking all over their body, struggle to keep the basic human instinct.”