It was August of 1989. I was again carrying something heavy in an "A" frame. I had to stoop a bit, as I was trying to balance the weight. As a result, I failed to notice a guard on patrol who was passing by me at that moment. I did not make the required bow to him.

Later, I was asked to report to him to receive my punishment. He and 7 or 8 of his colleagues brutally beat me. After the beating they stripped off my clothes, handcuffed me, and made me stay standing in the middle of a courtyard. Though it was August, it was extremely cold late at night. I learned that cold is even more painful than being beaten.

My wake-up call next morning came from the heavy foot of the lead prisoner, letting me know it was time to go to work. Work at that time was building bulletproof walls for security guards.

About that handcuffing: after the cuffs are on, guards step on the hands to tighten them. The hands go black very soon.

Another form of punishment was to force me to sit on top of quicklime when it was raining. Now, when water is added to quicklime, due to a chemical reaction the lime gets very hot, maybe 100 degrees C or more, and it exhumes gas. My buttocks were burning, but the guard forced me to sit there. Because of the burns on my backside, I was not able to lie on my back for about a month, and I suffered severe pain when relieving myself at the washroom. I couldn't even put trousers on for awhile. The watery discharge from the sore stuck to my pants and gave me an excruciating pain.

In the fall of 1990, I was caught by a prison guard named _________. My crime at this time was baking corn while i was on duty in a cornfield. He relentlessly beat me in the legs with burning wood. To this day the burn marks on my legs still give me shivers.

In a political prison camp in North Korea, one should forget that he or she is human. There are things one must do to survive. I carefully watched a dog so that I could steal its food. I ate snakes, frogs, rats, and anything that could be a source of nutrition.

Of course I was not the only one there, suffering. I met a lot of people. I saw people who cut off their own finger or pretended to be insane because the brutality of the forced labor was so unbearable. A man who had been beaten with a shovel had to have one of his arms cut off because it rotted due to tetanus. So many people spent 20-30 years in the prison camp simply because of some ludicrous crime their grandfather committed...