This is a picture with my fellow elementary school classmates taken in 1992
in north Hamgyoung province, Hoeryong, North Korea.
You can tell this is before our public food system collapsed.
When I was in middle school, I began to notice empty chairs in front of the desks in my classroom.
After 1994, many people from my hometown in North Korea died from starvation, including my classmates.
The coal mines deep in the mountains where we lived were filled with desperate people planning to flee, because there was nothing to eat.
Even my neighbors – the family that lived behind us, next to us, they all starved to death.
There were those who tried to prolong life by eating tree bark and grass, but they too ended up dying.
On April 12, 1995, my grandmother finally succumbed to starvation, and I watched her die with my own eyes.
For the last seven decades, the ruling Kim family has deceived the North Korean people.
Even as my classmates were dying from starvation, our teacher continued to push the notion
that our happy system of socialism was the best in the world.
Kim Jong-il ordered people to press on despite the hunger.
He told us that food would be soon made available like water coming down a waterfall.
I later found out that the public distribution system had broken down
and that Kim Jong-il withheld food from the hungriest parts of my country
intentionally starving us to death.
At the far end of my hometown was the Camp 22 political prison camp.
Here the political prisoners mined 1200 tons of coal every day, without break or rest.
One day I realized that I could scavenge and sell this coal for money to buy corn to feed our family.
I would go out at night together with my mother and younger sister who was 12 years old at the time to gather the coal.
A freight train ran from the prison camp to a power plant, and we would grab onto it as it sped by
or sneak aboard it as it departed the station.
We did this to avoid the armed soldiers who were always guarding the trains.
There were times when we were caught and those times we were beaten until our bones were broken.
I can still feel to this day, the weight of my coal sack.
For a starving person who weighed just 45 pounds and was 4 feet 2 inches tall like myself, this was such a difficult, hard task.
Because I was so skinny and gaunt, the heavy sack would scrape against my back
and sometimes my skin would break and blood would gush out.
In the early morning of March 7, 1996, when I was 14 years old
I ran up to a moving train and pulled myself aboard.
The train number was #4031, and the particular car I climbed aboard carried almost 60 tons of coal.
There were many others like me who were aboard, secretly loading their sacks with coal.
Except for their eyes and teeth, their entire body was black from soot, sweat, and coal dust.
I was dizzy as I worked because I had not eaten for several days.
I planned to get off the train as it entered the next station, but I blacked out.
When I opened my eyes, I was lying in between the two railway tracks.
The train had passed over my left leg, and it was hanging from the rest of my body by just a tendon.
Blood gushed out as I was taking my breath.
It is hard to describe the fear and the pain I felt at that exact moment.
I tried to stop the flow of blood by grabbing my leg, but then I noticed
that three fingers on my left hand were cut off and blood was gushing out there as well.
I cried out to my mother to save me. I cried out to my father. And I cried out my sister’s name.
The sub-zero temperature made my injuries so cold and much more painful.
My sister found me, but all she could do was wrap her scarf around me and shake in fear.
Finally several men came and carried me to a local hospital.
I was still cold and I was so thirsty, even when I arrived at the hospital.
I can still remember the surgical tools laid out in the room.
There was no blood transfusion and no painkillers.
I still remember very vividly to this day the sound of the saw cutting through my leg bone
and the vibration that it caused throughout the rest of my body.
I still remember what it felt like when a smaller scalpel was used to trim the splintered bone.
I can still feel the sound the pan below the surgical table made as my blood dripped on it.
I still remember the sound that was made when my flesh was being cut off
and the sound of the doctor slapping me to force me to stay awake every time I began to pass out.
Without any additional medicine or anesthetics I was sent home, and we had no money to buy any medicine.
It was harder than death to try to cope and survive like this each day after the surgery
Every night I cried out in pain, whispering ‘please kill me’, ‘please kill me’ repeatedly
falling asleep only later in the morning as the new day began.
I felt guilty for eating the food that my younger siblings worked so hard to obtain for me.
North Korea was still deep in famine, and everyone except government officials were starving.
My younger brother scrounged leftover scraps of noodles in the trash from the local market
all day long, and washed and boiled them and always shared them with me by putting the noodles into my mouth.
I will never forget my feeling of gratitude for him
and I will never forget the taste of those noodles my brother scrounged from the trash.
He and my sister resorted to eating grass and wild mushrooms while I recovered
and their growth was stunted. For that, I am eternally sorry.
When summer came, the flesh around my amputations turned gangrenous.
And with the horrible stench, pieces of my leg bone pierced through the inflamed skin.
It was not until November of that year, 240 days after the accident, that the pain subsided.
But I was now a cripple, just like the ones I used to childishly taunt when I was a young kid
I thought, there was no future for me, I had no more dreams to live for
and for some time I thought about killing myself.
Eventually I felt that I could no longer be a burden to my family, so in the year 2000
I crossed over into China using crutches in search of food, and was able to obtain a few kilograms of rice.
While I was there I noticed that dogs in China ate better than my family did in North Korea
On my way back into North Korea, I was spotted by local police
They arrested me and said: “A worthless cripple like you is embarrassing our nation”
and that because I had gone over to China to beg for food in my condition I had defamed and damaged the dignity of the Dear Leader.
They took all of my rice, and tortured me.
Another person was arrested along with me, but he didn’t get beaten as badly
they reserved special punishment for disabled people, and that was what hurt me the most.
That injustice motivated me to leave North Korea in 2006, using crutches.
And with my brother, I planned my escape.
Before we left, my father and brother and I had a drink together and toasted one another
and we remember saying to one another, with my father crying, when we embraced and we cried with one another.
My brother and I, we went north to the Tumen river.
Crossing the river, holding my crutch, my useless hand dangling
I fell in a deep seam in the river and I began to drown and swallow water
I felt my life ebbing away. But at that moment, my brother spotted me, grabbed me by the hair, and dragged me across.
I owe my life to him.
Using the crutches, I embarked on a 6,000 mile journey to the jungles of Southeast Asia through an underground Chinese railroad network
I crossed from China, into Laos, through Burma, and eventually to Thailand.
I was in so much pain that I literally wanted to die. At that moment I cried and lamented the fact that I was born in North Korea.
I prayed and made a vow that I would work to make sure that no one else would have to live through the experience.
In July of 2006, I finally made it to South Korea.
My greatest wish up until that moment was to have a prosthetic arm and leg; these two were soon provided for me by the South Korean government.
I wanted to share this joy with my father.
And I wanted more than anything else to bring my father to this great world of happiness and be a good son to him.
I eventually was able to make contact with people from my hometown.
But I heard the terrible news that my father was dead.
I learned that after my brother and I escaped, my mother and sister defected also, and then he followed.
But he was caught and detained—the agents wanted to find out where his children went.
So they tortured him to death.
There was talk that because he had no family left, the officials just carried him in a wheelbarrow and left him in our empty house.
Despite the disability I had, I achieved my dream and my father’s dream that he had of me attending and getting a university education.
After arriving in a free country, I also felt that my duty was to be a spokesperson for disabled people in North Korea.
So I founded a group called Now, Action, and Unity for Human Rights.
Despite our tiny one-room office, in the last four years
we have rescued over 100 North Korean children, disabled people, and young women refugees from China, bringing them to South Korea.
The North Korean people have no internet, so we broadcast radio messages to them with truth, culture, and knowledge.
It is very important for us to talk to the world about what goes on inside North Korea, but it is more important for us to tell North Koreans about the outside world.
With outside information arriving by radio and through black markets, North Korea is changing.
Today I stand here, having come from the brink of death to triumph against all odds.
These are the crutches that I used to drag myself across 10,000 kilometers or 6,000 miles.
I never lost this. To me it symbolizes that you can achieve anything if you do not give up.
It is also something that my father made for me before he died.
From where I am, I am doing my best for the freedom of North Korea. 0:13:02.000,0:03:11.000 More importantly, I say to you that a free North Korea is possible with your help, if we pursue it with this kind of determination.
Please help me and join with me in fighting for a free North Korea.
Please, stand together with me. Thank you.