Is this difficult to talk about?
It is very difficult but the whole world needs to know what horrible things
are going on in North Korea.
I take responsibility in sharing
my story despite the hardship.
Camp 18 in Bukchang is North Korea's oldest and
arguably most infamous concentration camp.
Few people ever leave it, but Kim Hye-Sook,
a woman who spent a majority of her life in the camp, and not only escaped in 2009,
finally defected to South Korea soon after and has been making
haunting marker drawings of the atrocities she's witnessed ever since.
Why did you decide to make these drawings?
I got much better since I came to South Korea but
before I came here, I
had worked in a coal mine from when I was 14 to 30. Suffering from pneumoconiosis,
I just could not speak. I thought hard for the best way to tell my stories, of all my
experiences and decided to show it in drawings. A picture is worth a thousand
words, so despite my lack of talent, I started drawing.
And where were you?
What camp was it?
I served from the end of February 1975 to August 15, 2002 in Bukchang in in
Bukchang-guen Bongchang-li, South Pyongan Province, at Camp 18.
And why were you sent there?
I learned that it was because my grandfather had gone over
to South Korea during the Korean War.
Can you tell me what's
going on here?
I went to China in 2005 and was caught in 2007, and this was in 2008.
This is Chongjin Concentration Center and there was a torture room upstairs.
They tortured people to know who they met in China or
if they had intention to go to South Korea.
They tortured using physical force, mostly hitting.
What's going on in this picture right here?
I was all alone and here comes a woman I'd known before!
A guard came in and started cursing out the woman,
calling her a "bitch that ate her own son."
People were eating people, especially children at Camp 18.
What was the perception or
reputation of the Kim family,
the Kim dynasty in the camps, did people hate them?
Well, I was born there and raised being brainwashed.
I lived believing Kim II-sung as god.
Even when I lived in a camp fr such a long time,
I didn't realize it was the government,
Kim Il-sung and Kim Jung-il's fault.
When I first got here, I could not dare call Kim Il-Sung or
Kim Jung-il only by their names.
And the U.N. has used those drawings to confirm where that camp actually was.
Since nobody can actually go there, they sent a satellite.
It took 8 months for it to get the photos.
When they compared them, everything fit right in.
When the UN told North Korea about Camp 18,
the North Koreans strongly denied it and I drew a map so
precisely that the satellite photos exactly match it.
We're at the Unification Observatory and we're actually going to go up to
the observatory and take a look at North Korea at a distance.
Here, right here.
It's here.
This is Daedong river, where they held public executions non-stop.
They announced the public executions for us to all gather and watch.
Even the people from Camp 14 would line up and watch the executions.
It was impossible for anyone to leave Camp 14.
I lived at Camp 18 for 28 years but no one has ever tried to escape.
These black lines are all barb-wire fences.
The fences were 4 meters in height.
But here (around the edges), they put 3300 [volts] of electricity.
You'd hear the electricity running through and I ran when the vibration stopped.
While it's on, if anyone gets close,
it would suck them right in and burn them to death.
So who would dare to?
Nobody's ever escaped here.
Right now, we are mere kilometres from the North Korean border.
It's a really strange feeling because that means from a stone's throw, basically,
I can almost picture myself swimming across that.
It's just this total that's taken on this completely different meaning to me now,
and in fact, it's surreal, cuz we have all these vacation binoculars.
You can see it in Staten Island or Niagara Falls.
Just peering across it as if it's some sort of
spectacle because frankly, it kind of is.
Are you in touch with a lot of people in North Korea still?
In December, I found a broker to find my younger siblings in North Korea.
He brought my youngest sibling to the border.
But the snowy weather wasn't permitting our meeting and
he had to go back to work after a week of leave.
And my parents are both buried there.
So, to be honest, of course, I want to go visit.
What's your new life and
soul like in comparison?
I'm doing alright here.
But my family is always on my mind When I eat, or feel happy,
or watch TV, my family is always on my mind at every moment.
It's already been over 5 years since I came to South Korea, but I still only see
North Korea, and the scenes from the concentration camp in my dreams.
It's strange but I've never seen my life in South Korea in my dreams yet.