The determined story of a North Korean defector caught trying to escape Part 2

When Scott Kim was in China he looked for his mother, and was caught a second time, when a neighbor again reported him to the police. He was sent back to North Korea, to a concentration camp near his hometown. From there he was sent to a labor camp, where he chopped down trees on a mountain for months. He escaped one day when he realized that all his fellow laborers were at the top of the mountain chopping while he was at the bottom.

He ran away as fast as he could until he found a train that he could take him north to cross the border with China again. After some time in China, he was caught a third time and sent to a camp for political prisoners — the worst place to be sent, as imprisonment there is interminable. He escaped the camp by bribing the authorities through a broker, who helped him make it across the border with China a final time.

In China, he went back to work to pay off his debt to the broker. One day, he got a call from a North Korean woman who told him that his mother was dying of cancer. For the first time in many years, the two saw each other.

“When I opened the door of my mother’s house, I froze, and couldn’t say anything, because my mother looked incredibly different,” he said. “There was no fat on her …. I just went outside and cried for a long time and came back again, and I embraced my mother and we cried together.”

Several days later, a friend of his mother offered his mother the opportunity to escape to South Korea via Laos and Cambodia. A broker was taking a group through; they had an extra space. Unable to walk, Kim’s mother told Kim he should go instead.

The long journey began. The night before Kim and the group of defectors were to cross the border into Laos, he received a call telling him that his mother had died.

In 2007, Kim finally made it to South Korea, six years after he first escaped.

[Business Insider]

This entry was posted in China, Humanitarian Aid and Relief, North Korean refugee, Prison Camps by Grant Montgomery.