This is a picture I took in 1992 with my primary school classmates in Hoeryong City, Hamgyoung Province.
When I was in middle school, I started noticing empty desks in my classroom.
Starting in 1994, many people in my hometown in North Korea starved to death, including my friends.
Many people from the mountainous mining village where I lived, looked for food.
And people who looked for grass or tree bark to eat eventually died, including my neighbors.
On April 12, 1995, my grandmother also died from starvation, and I could do nothing but watch her.
For past 70 years, the Kim family has lied to the North Korean people. My school's
teachers taught us lies saying that the North Korean style of socialism was the best in the world.
All the while, my friends were dying.
Kim Jong-il kept on pressuring our people, despite the pervasive hunger
saying that they were to receive food very soon.
I would later find out that the regime withheld food from the areas populated
by those bad "songbun", or those from the lowest social caste, who lived in the poorest regions of the country.
At the edge of my hometown in Hoeryong, there stood the 22nd political prison camp.
Prisoners in that camp had to dig out 1,200 tons of coal every day without a moment of rest.
I thought I could help feed my family if I stole some of this coal.
I would go out at night with my mother and my 12-year-old sister to steal it.
One night, I got into a moving train to try to steal some coal
but because I've starved for several days, I lost consciousness.
When I woke up again, I realized that my body was laying over the train tracks
and that a train car was passing over my body.
I tried to stop my leg from bleeding, but that's when I noticed that my left hand
had also been cut off, and that it also kept on bleeding. I could not stop it.
That's when I realized that I'd not lost only my leg, but also my hand.
I yelled for my mother, my father, and for my sister, and I begged for them to help me.
But because of the subzero temperatures in North Korea, my wounds are freezing even further
and this was a pain that a 16-year-old, myself, could not bear.
My 12-year-old sister found me but she was also terrorized and trembling with fear and all she could do
is to unwrap the scarf that she had around her neck and then to wrap it around my wound.
And it was only after she begged for people to help me that several men came and then took me away.
I was still cold and very thirsty when I arrived at the hospital.
I remember how the surgical tools were laid out on the operating table
and there was no transfusion and no anesthesia, that's what I remember.
I remember the vibrations of the saw as it cut through my leg bone.
And I remember the pain that I felt when the scalpel sliced my flesh open.
And I remember fainting from the pain of my tendons being cut apart.
The operation took three hours, and after those three hours
the doctors sent me home without any medication.
Surviving the surgery was even harder than if I had died right away.
And I would cry every night from the pain that I would feel without any antibiotics; any kind of anesthesia.
And there were times where I would cry myself to sleep until the morning, begging for somebody to kill me.
When summer came, the part of my leg that had been amputated turned gangrenous
so it started smelling putrid. And what happened was that the parts of the bone
that were still sticking out would stick out of my flesh and cause me a great deal of pain.
The pain only subsided in November, 240 days after I had the surgery.
At that time, I thought I had no future, and that I had nothing to live for.
And I even considered to take my own life, because I did not want to be a burden on my family.
No longer wanting to be a burden on my family, I crossed over to China in 2000 on my crutches.
I found a few kilograms of rice in China, and I found that in China
animals, dogs in the streets, ate better than my family did in North Korea.
Once I returned to North Korea, I was immediately arrested by the police who told me that
"It was a shame to our republic that a cripple like you had crossed over to China, begged for food
and casted shame on the face of our great leader and brought shame upon our great republic."
They told me to die, while stepping on my neck with their boots, and I could not breathe.
I was tortured worse than other people who
had been caught by the police and who did not have any disabilities.
And I was insulted worse than all of those people. And this was something that hurt me deeply.
Eventually, I decided to leave my hometown and my country.
And it was in 2006 that I decided to defect North Korea.
I hugged my father and we were both in tears. And I promised that we would meet again very soon, and I left.
I crossed the Tumen river on the border with China.
I cannot remember how many times I nearly drowned in the river and how much river water I drank because of it.
Missing a leg and a hand, I depended on my crutches
to cross China, Laos, Burma, and Thailand, spanning a total of 10,000 kilometers.
I was in so much pain from the journey using my crutches and I wanted to die.
I regretted having been born in North Korea, and I prayed and I swore that I would make sure
that nobody would face the same kind of suffering that I did.
In July of 2006, I arrived in the Republic of Korea, South Korea, after my long journey and arrived in Seoul.
At that time, my biggest dream was to receive a prosthetic leg and a prosthetic arm.
The South Korean government provided me with both of those.
Wanting to share this joyful news with my father, I reached out to people in North Korea.
And I finally got in touch with acquaintances in my hometown.
But I found out that my father had passed away.
My father was at the Chinese border on his way to also escape North Korea when he was arrested by soldiers.
And he was continuously tortured once he was handed over to the secret police.
And he eventually died from his injuries, which means
that I'm a son who could not witness the last moments of my father.
Despite the tragedies that befell my family, and despite my disability, I did not give up.
I achieved my dream of walking by myself, and now I'm a graduate student in criminal law.
I also started my NGO, NAUH now, in a small office with my friends in 2010.
Over the past eight years, we've rescued 340 North Korean women who had escaped North Korea
and who were at the risk of being trafficked inside China. And we brought them to freedom in South Korea.
Because there's no internet in North Korea, they cannot access information.
So what we do is we talk to them about human rights and about freedom through radio transmissions.
And we also conduct awareness campaigns around the world
to educate people about what is happening inside North Korea.
Today, I stand before you having been to the brink of death.
Here, I present to you, in my hands, the crutches that I used for support
when I was traveling those 10,000 kilometers for freedom.
These crutches symbolize my journey to freedom and my unwillingness to give up.
But they're also the last objects that my father crafted with his hands, and that were left behind by him.
I will do my best from where I stand in order to bring freedom to North Korea.
But what is important is that this freedom is only possible when everybody, when everyone here, helps.
I beg you to help us and to support us in our goal.
Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Please!
North Korea freedom! North Korea freedom!