1979, Manager Kim is Inheriting Dictatorship! - Chapter 45
Only Krnovel
Episode 45
“North Korea’s political prison camp?”
Pope Paul asks back, slightly surprised.
“During this unification process, several political prison camps were discovered. And it turned out that more terrible things were happening there than we had thought.”
Then a foreign correspondent raises his hand and asks.
“President Kim Jung-guk. I’m sorry to interrupt your speech, but may I ask you something?”
“Um.. I’ll ask all the questions later..”
I’m trying to stop the chief secretary from doing that.
“No, it’s okay. Make yourself comfortable.”
When the topic of political prison camps comes up, other reporters also focus and start writing.
“President Kim Jong-guk. I heard that the treatment of prisoners in North Korea’s political prison camps is not very good. How bad is it?”
“Um… I don’t know how to talk about this. If I were to tell you everything as it is, it would be impossible for the media to report. However, to give you an example, when our military first arrived at the political prison camp, most of the prisoners were so injured that their bones were visible. Most of the people who were managing them ran away, so they didn’t even have water for a few days and were suffering from dehydration.”
The reporter takes the microphone and asks again, writing diligently.
“Was it really that bad? So most of the people incarcerated there were people who had committed crimes?”
“No. They are people who were forcibly taken away by the North Korean authorities on the grounds that they were thought criminals. They were our ordinary neighbors, family, and friends.”
The reporters quickly begin to write down their stories.
“Then, one last thing, if so, was the proportion of foreigners also high, excluding simply North Korean residents?”
“Yes, of course. There were many North Koreans, but a significant proportion of the political prisoner camps were foreigners or South Korean POWs who had been kidnapped during the Korean War.”
“FUCK..! These guys are really crazy..”
Suddenly, a curse word comes out of the reporter’s mouth.
The reporter immediately bows his head and apologizes.
“Ah.. I’m sorry··· Stop..”
I looked at Pope Paul again and asked:
“Your Holiness, can you please go and give some comfort to their afflicted souls?”
“Of course. No, I would rather ask you to let me go.”
Pope Paul, who seemed a little hesitant, changed his appearance to one that seemed eager to go after listening to me answer questions with the reporter.
So we headed to the nearest political prison camp in Nampo City.
And just as we near the camp, we see outside the window a cemetery under construction.
And the Pope, who was watching this, asked the staff member sitting in front of him.
“What are they building over there now?”
The employee hesitates for a moment and then speaks.
“We are building a graveyard for the dead found in political prison camps.”
The Pope asks in surprise.
“A graveyard..? Didn’t the people who died there have separate graves?”
“Yes.. That mass graveyard is a graveyard for nameless people who died in political prison camps. Those who died there were just buried in groups in a hole without any treatment after they died. It looked like they were burying livestock.”
“Huh.. really..”
Pope Paul sighs in disbelief when he hears the story of them being buried like livestock.
“This is true.. It is my job as a religious leader to love and forgive everyone.. but whenever I see this, I get really angry.”
The Pope speaks to me in a slightly angry voice.
“No. Anyone would be like that. I was so shocked when I first heard about this.”
Even though the reality of the camps was already known to everyone back in 2023, the shock of hearing that it was a reality was quite great.
‘Those who have given up on being human…’
Before we knew it, the car had arrived in front of the political prisoner camp.
“We’ve arrived. Shall we go?”
A military official in charge of the political prison camp comes out and gives me a tour.
The political prisoner camp looked grim from the entrance.
Reporters were quick to flash their cameras as they captured the first public glimpse of North Korea’s political prison camps.
“This is… from the entrance… my heart hurts so much.”
From the entrance, the atmosphere felt a little different from other places, as if the spirits of the dead were lingering here.
“Shall we go inside?”
“Let’s do that.”
We explore various places inside the camp, guided by military personnel.
This place was left as is, without any renovation, to leave a record of the horrors that took place here.
“This is a place that recreates the meals and clothing that the former inmates ate.”
The food that the staff showed us there was so much food that it was embarrassing to even call it a meal.
A little cornmeal mixed with a lot of sand.
And the soup is practically like hot water.
And a few side dishes made with old-looking vegetables that you couldn’t even tell if they were kimchi or just cabbage.
This was the usual meal eaten by the inmates here.
To even eat this, I had to complete an absurd amount of daily work quota.
“Is this really the food that was distributed in this camp?”
“Yes. It may be hard to believe, but there were many days when this meal was not distributed.”
“Isn’t this just too much! At this level, isn’t it basically no different from the Nazi concentration camps in the past?”
Pope Paul is furious and denounces.
He was known for his kind personality. It was rare to see him get this angry.
“I too… When I first heard about this, my heart ached so much. As you heard earlier, most of the people in this political prison camp were actually people who had been brought in for crimes against the Kim family regime in North Korea. They weren’t evil criminals or anything like that, they were all ordinary people.”
Next to the ridiculous meal, there were pieces of cloth that looked too embarrassing to be called clothes, divided into tops and bottoms.
“What is this rag-like thing? Could this be the clothes they were wearing?”
“Yes. These are the clothes they were actually wearing when we found them. They said they were only given one set of clothes that were worse than rags.”
“This can’t be happening! This isn’t right!”
The Pope is furious and angry.
And reporters captured the scene endlessly on camera.
Afterwards, the staff guides the inmates inside to the rooms where they usually live.
“.. .. .. .. ..”
It was a dirty, old, and smelly room.
But the biggest problem was that it was too small.
Even though it is a correctional facility, it provides a space large enough for each person to lie down and sleep.
But this room was so small that it was questionable whether eight people could really sleep in it.
“.. .. .. ..”
Torture facilities inside the correctional facility after that.
I visited a facility where people worked all day.
The Pope, who was initially angry, later became speechless and fell silent as the terrible tragedy continued.
After I finished touring all the facilities, I asked Pope Paul.
“Then would you like to go to a place where there is a space for prayer?”
“no···.”
Pope Paul refuses.
Then he says with a solemn expression.
“Can I go to the place where these people are buried? I want to comfort their souls at the place where they were buried alone.”
“The road is a bit rough. Are you okay with that?”
A military official asks.
“Yes, it doesn’t matter.”
The military officer nods and heads along the rough path inside to the hill at the very edge of the camp. And at the end of the hill, there are numerous barbed wire fences.
“That barbed wire is···.”
“It looks like they did it that way to prevent escape. They said it was impossible to dismantle it because the electricity was running through it.”
“Really… it was a place you could only escape from by dying···.”
After a while, if you go a little further, you will finally come across a large pit.
“This is it. We buried all the dead in this pit.”
It was a place that seemed difficult to believe was a place where people were buried.
There was no indication that anyone had been buried here.
To an untrained eye, it would appear to be just a large hole in a rugged hill.
“This… really..”
I had heard about it a few times, but this was my first time actually seeing it.
And I was dumbfounded by the sight.
There was no courtesy towards lions anywhere in this place.
“I’ll bring you something to sit on.”
It was a hill full of very rough dirt and rocks.
It seemed that he needed something to sit on in order to pray, so he instructed the attendant to bring something.
But Pope Paul shook his head and refused.
“No. I’ll just leave it like this.”
“Are you okay···”
Pope Paul nods.
Pope Paul prayed on his knees on the bare, rough dirt in a place filled with the souls of the people who had suffered wrong.
“Christ. In this place, things have happened that are so hard that it is hard to believe that humans have done them in the past. May the souls of those who died here be saved.. .. .. .. ..”
A few tears flow from his eyes.
The camera shutter goes off countless times.
The Pope kneels and prays in a North Korean political prison camp.
And he even shed tears on the bare ground.
This groundbreaking appearance was reported on the front pages of newspapers around the world the next day.
After that, I toured various places in North Korea and finally met and consoled people who had been captured as prisoners of war by the South Korean military during the Korean War and survived in political prison camps until now.
It was not originally planned, but was requested directly by the Pope after his visit to the camp.
“Have you recovered well?”
The Pope touches their rough hands and asks:
The young man who was in his 20s during the Korean War has now become a middle-aged man in his 50s.
However, his face was so damaged that he looked like a man in his 70s, perhaps because of the hardships he endured in the concentration camp.
“Yes.. It’s okay. Thank you.. Your Holiness.. Sob.. Sob.. I’m happy. It’s a little late, but I’m meeting my family in the south again like this.. And now that I can step on my hometown soil and die, I have no regrets even if I die here.”
The middle-aged hero spoke with tears in his eyes.
“Don’t say such things.. God’s grace will be with you from now on.”
Pope Paul consoles the now middle-aged hero.
###
After the Pope’s visit, the world’s media was in an uproar.
I was surprised to find that South Korea has developed quite a bit compared to the past, and I was also surprised to find that infrastructure construction in most areas of North Korea has progressed rapidly and, above all, that public security is stable.
“It’s okay to travel to Korea now.”
“Yeah. I heard that the mountains in Korea are so nice. Next time, why don’t we travel to Korea instead of Japan?”
Since the Pope’s visit, the number of people traveling to Korea has increased dramatically, especially from Catholic countries.
Of course, what surprised the world the most were the atrocities committed by the North Korean regime in the past.
Especially in the West, people were shocked to see that the political prison camps were worse than the Nazi concentration camps for Jews in the past.
“No, this is really too much! This is no different from Nazis!”
“Are the Soviet Union and China really out of their minds to support a country like this? Has the Soviet Union forgotten all the things they suffered at the hands of the Nazis in the past?”
The Soviet Union and China tried to say that it was all false information and that it was a fabrication by the Korean government, but they were unable to say anything in the face of the clear photos and witness testimonies.
Rather, public opinion even within the country grew in favor of extraditing North Korea’s leaders to South Korea.
People in the Soviet Union and China, as well as those who had access to some Western media, were shocked when they saw the images of political prison camps in Korea and were outraged, asking if they had fought for a country like that.
The Pope’s visit will allow South Korea to show that a unified Korea is now safe and much more advanced than before, while also informing the world about the atrocities committed by the North Korean regime in the past.
YOU MAY ALSO LIKE
