He writes on page 99 and ff: “Suicide was not uncommon in the camp. A number of our neighbors took that road out of Yodok. They usually left behind letters criticizing the regime, or at the very least its Security Force. They were heedless acts which virtually guaranteed that the letter writer’s family would be sent to a place worse still than Yodok. Truth be told, some form of punishment would await the family regardless of whether or not a critical note were left behind. It was a rule that admitted no exceptions.

“The Party saw suicide as an attempt to escape its grasp, and if the individual who had tried the trick wasn’t around to pay for it, someone else needed to be found. Some suicides tried to palliate the punishment their relatives faced by leaving notes in which they maintained their innocence but reiterated their faith in communism and in the regime of the much-beloved Great Leader. This sometimes induced the agents to treat the surviving family with relative leniency and merely add five extra years to the family’s original sentence, whose length they, in any case, never knew.”