Eyes of the Tailless Animals

Needed a fairly quick and easy book to read while recovering from surgery, so turned to Soon Ok Lee’s Eyes of the Tailless Animals, Prison Memoirs of a North Korean Woman (Living Sacrifice Book Company, 1999).

It turned out to be quick and light due to its length (154 pages), as well as clear and simple writing. Even though I am supposed to be moderately immune to horror stories from those who survived North Korean labor camps, having read so much from the genre, the book still contained rather disturbing elements.

Such as prison guards pouring boiling liquid iron at a temperature of 1,200 degrees on top of prisoners who refused to renounce Christianity.

“Suddenly, the smell of burning flesh assailed my nostrils. The bodies began to shrivel from the intense heat as the liquid metal burned right through their flesh.”

“I looked at their shrunken bodies and wondered in my heart, what do they believe? What do they see in the empty sky? What could be more important to them than their lives?”

“In the years I was in prison, I saw many believers die. Yet they never, never denied the God who is in heaven. All they had to do was say they don’t believe in religion and they would have been released.”

Then there were the sadistic prison guards who told prisoners that if they dashed towards the prison fence and leap over it, they would be set free. Many did so only to have their bodies scorched when they touched the high-voltage wire on the fence. The guards were said to have watched prisoners die “as if they were watching a funny show.”

A prisoner who did not want to see her son’s execution screamed and ripped out her own eyeballs. “Everything happened so quickly. Her eyeballs were hanging by tendons and they were swinging. It was sickening and tragic to watch.”

Pregnant female prisoners were forced to abort their babies as the regime believed that all anti-communists should be eliminated within three generations. Poison was injected into the women who suffered tremendous pain until the babies were stillborn 24 hours later. Medical officers walked around the pregnant women and kicked their swollen bellies if they screamed or moaned.

“The mother of these newborn babies just laid on the floor, and sobbed so helplessly, while a medical officer twisted the babies’ necks,” Lee wrote, adding that the dead babies were used “to make medicine.”

Then there was the case of how prison kitchens ran out of water to rinse cabbages covered with chemicals. But cooks went ahead to prepare cabbage soup anyway. Hundreds of prisoners subsequently came down with food poisoning, and many died as they were already malnourished. That was in May 1988, in summer, where the bodies “quickly began to rot and stink". Many who passed out “were carried out with the dead to an ever-growing pile of bodies.”

As for public executions, prisoners were tied to a post, mouths covered with a mask and eyes left wide open. 18 bullets were then shot into the upper part of the body leading to blood spurting all over. Surviving prisoners were then ordered to walk around the body within three feet and look straight into it. “Look at him and feel hatred for him. Swear to yourself that you won’t follow his example.”

For one of the executed prisoners, the officer reportedly said: “He was against the government and dissatisfied with the Party policy, so he sneaked into the kitchen and stole balls of rice. When he was being punished for his crime of stealing, he said, “I’d rather die than live in this pain.” His remark showed that he betrayed the great care of Kim II Sung.”

And when blood from public executions spurted on those who were in the front row, some female prisoners “lost their minds and became psychotic.” They cried, laughed and sang, or fainted, and these reactions were seen as “disagreements with the Party or a lack of a firm belief in communism.”

It is indeed a mad, crazy and demented world.

Lee proclaimed that “the barbarous crimes of the North Korean government will never escape the severest judgment of God and history.”

Somehow, I am less optimistic. Judgment from God aside, will any earthly judgment matters when it comes at a different time, a different regime, and where all the protagonists have come to pass? Some people will certainly have to be judged, but perhaps not in their life times. Little solace for their countless tormented victims.