48 marieclaire.com.au
I
t is mandatory from primary
school to attend public execu-
tions. Factories would send their
workers to ensure a large crowd.
I always tried to avoid attending
but on one occasion I made an exception
because I knew one of the men being
killed. Many people in [my city] Hyesan
knew him. You might think the execu-
tion of an acquaintance is the last thing
you’d want to see. In fact, people made
excuses not to go if they didn’t know the
victim. If they knew the victim, they felt
obliged to go, as they would to a funeral.
He was in his 20s, always had mon-
ey and was popular with
girls. His crime was help-
ing people to escape to
China and selling banned
goods. But his real offence
was to continue his illegal
activity in the mourning
period following Kim Il-
sung’s death.
He was to be shot along with three
others at Hyesan Airport, a common
site for executions. The men were
brought out of a van before a large crowd
waiting in the glaring heat. The popular
guy had to be lifted up and dragged to
the post by a group of police, with the
tips of his feet scraping along in the
dust. He seemed half dead already.
Each of the men had his head, chest
and waist tied to a stake. A perfunctorypeople’s trial opened and a judge asked
if they had any last words. He wasn’t ex-
pecting a response, since all three had
been gagged and had stones pushed into
their mouths to stop them cursing the
regime with their final breath.
Three uniformed marksmen then
lined up and took aim. The noise of the
shots ricocheted in the dry air – three
shots, the first in the head; the second in
the chest; the third in the
stomach. When the shot
hit the popular guy’s head
it exploded, leaving a fine
pink mist. His family had
been forced to watch from
the front row.
A few days later I saw
famine for the first time.
I was at the market outside Wiyeon
Station in Hyesan and saw a woman on
the ground with a baby in her arms.
They were pale and skeletal and dressed
in rags. The woman’s face was caked in
filth and her hair badly matted. She
looked sick. To my astonishment people
were walking past her and the baby as if
they were invisible.
I could not ignore her. I put a 100-
won note on the baby’s lap. I thought itwas hopeless to give it to the mother.
Her eyes were clouded and not focusing.
She wasn’t seeing me. I guessed she was
close to death. The money would have
bought food for a couple of days.
“I rescued a baby today,” I told my
mother when I got home.
“What do you mean?”
I told her what I had done. She
turned to me, highly annoyed.
“Are you stupid? How can a baby
buy anything? Some thief will have
snatched that note straight off him. You
should have just bought food for them.”
She was right and I felt responsible.The late 1990s were a time of
terrible famine and barbaric
oppression in North Korea
under the leadership of Kim
Jong-il. Hyeonseo Lee, who
escaped to China in 1997,
describes what it was like to
live under the tyrannical
regime during this time.HYEONSEO LEE Lee wanted to escape the brutal
regime of the Kim dynasty (two
late leaders are memorialised in
bronze, below, and celebrated
at a military parade, above).“It was
mandatory from
primary school
to attend public
executions”This is an edited extract from
The Girl With Seven Names:
A North Korean Defector’s
Story by Hyeonseo Lee
(HarperCollins, $22.99), out now.