A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea

by Masaji Ishikawa

I looked around at the ramshackle cottages with their thatched roofs sprinkled with snow. It sounds picturesque. But it wasn’t. It

Even as people faced incredible hardship and deprivation of both the physical and mental variety and wasted away under food shortages, we weren’t allowed to think for ourselves or take any initiative. The penalty for thinking was death. I can never forgive Kim Il-sung for taking away our right to think.

We lived under constant surveillance so stifling you couldn’t breathe. But on the tractor, I was strangely free. It was one of the only times I was entirely in my own world, and I could survey things, unobserved. I can’t tell you what pleasure that gave me. People ridiculed me. “What on earth are you doing?” they asked. “Why are you working so hard?” They didn’t understand that driving that tractor was the only freedom I had, my only respite from the orders and insults that assaulted us day in and day out. So no, I wasn’t crazy. Work was my only refuge. And I just enjoyed driving that tractor.

But Young’s behavior reminded me what it was to be a human being. And I came to recognize that, no matter how difficult the reality, you mustn’t let yourself be beaten. You must have a strong will. You have to summon what you know is right from your innermost depths and follow it.

Kim Il-sung’s menacing rule had invaded every single aspect of my life, like a bayonet inches from my throat.

When you’re starving to death, you lose all the fat from your lips and nose. Once your lips disappear, your teeth are bared all the time, like a snarling dog. Your nose is reduced to a pair of nostrils. I wish desperately that I didn’t know these things, but I do.