A family's escape from North Korea through a minefield and stormy seas

Earlier this year, Mr Kim pulled off a seemingly impossible escape from North Korea. He fled by sea with his entire family - his pregnant wife, his mother, his brother's family, and an urn containing his father's ashes.

They are the first people to have fled the country this year and make it to the South. When Covid struck, North Korea's government panicked and sealed the country off from the rest of the world, closing its borders and cutting off trade. Defections, once fairly common, virtually ceased.

Mr Kim told the BBC how he masterminded such a remarkable escape, in the first interview with a defector to have got out since the pandemic. He revealed new details about life in the country, including cases of people starving to death and increasing repression. He asked us not to use his full name, to help protect his family in Seoul and back in the North.

The BBC cannot independently all of Mr Kim's , but much of the detail tallies with what we have been told by other sources. 

 The night of the escape was a turbulent one. Fierce winds swept up from the south, bringing a storm in their wake. This was all part of Mr Kim's plan. The rough seas would force any surveillance ships to retreat, he hoped.  

He had been dreaming of this night for years, planning it meticulously for months, but this did little to temper his fear. 

His brother's children were asleep, knocked out by sleeping pills he had fed them. He and his brother now had to carry them through a minefield in the dark, to where their getaway boat was secretly moored. They inched along, careful to avoid the beams from the guards' searchlights.

Once they reached the boat, they hid the children in old grain sacks, disguising them to look like bags of tools. With that, the family set sail for South Korea: the men armed with swords, the women with poison. Each clutched a single eggshell, hollowed out and filled with chilli powder and black sand, to crack into the faces of the coastguards if a confrontation ensued.

Their engine roared, but all Mr Kim could hear was his thumping heart. One mistake now, and they could all be executed. 

 When I met Mr Kim in the outskirts of Seoul last month, he was accompanied by a plain clothes police officer - a typical safety measure for recent defectors. It had only been a few weeks since he and his family were released from the resettlement centre that North Koreans are sent to after arriving in South Korea.

 "There has been a lot of suffering," he said, as he began to recount the past four years.  

In the early days of Covid-19, people were "extremely scared", he said. The state broadcast images of people dying around the world, and warned that if the rules were not followed, the entire country could be wiped out.  Some people were even sent to labour camps for breaking Covid rules, he said.

 When a suspected case was reported, guards would quarantine the entire village, he said. Everyone would be locked up and the area sealed off, leaving those inside with little or nothing to eat. 

"After they'd starved people for a while, the government would bring in truckloads of food supplies. They claimed to be selling the food cheaply, so people would praise them - like starving your baby, then giving them a small amount, so it would thank you."

Mr Kim said people began to question whether this was part of the state's strategy to profit from the pandemic. 

As more people survived Covid, they began to think the state had exaggerated the dangers, he said. "Now many believe it was just an excuse to oppress us."

It was the border closures that caused the most severe damage, he said.

Food supplies in North Korea have long been precarious, but with less coming into the country, prices skyrocketed, he said, making everyone's lives "so much harder". In the spring of 2022, he noticed the situation deteriorate further.

"For seven or eight years there wasn't much talk of starvation, but then we frequently started hearing about cases," he said. "You'd wake up one morning and hear: 'oh, someone in this district starved to death'. The next morning, we'd get another report." 

One day this February, Mr Kim said a customer from a neighbouring county turned up late to a meeting. He told him the police had rounded up everyone in his village over the suspected murder of an elderly couple. But after the autopsy, they announced the couple had starved, and rats must have eaten their fingers and toes while they were dying. The gruesome scene had made the investigators suspect foul play. 

Then in April, he says two farmers he personally knew starved to death. The farmers had the hardest time, he said, because if the harvest was bad, the state would force them to make up for it by handing over more of their personal food supply. 

We cannot independently confirm these deaths. The 2023 Global Report on Food Crises stated that since North Korea's borders closed, it has been "challenging to obtain accurate information on food insecurity" but there were "indications the situation is worsening". In March 2023 North Korea asked the World Food Programme for help.

Amnesty International's North Korea specialist, Choi Jae-hoon, said he had heard of cases of starvation, from escapees in Seoul who had managed to speak to family back home. "We are hearing that the food situation worsened during the Covid period, and that in some areas farmers tended to suffer the most," he said. But Mr Choi noted that the situation was not nearly as catastrophic as during the famine in the 1990s: "We're hearing that people have found ways to survive within their means."   

 Mr Kim himself found ways not only to survive, but to thrive. Like most people in North Korea before Covid, he made his money selling items on the black market - in his case motorbikes and televisions smuggled from China. But when the borders closed, stifling virtually all trade, he switched to buying and selling vegetables. He figured everyone needed to eat.

 He set himself up as a "grasshopper seller", hawking his items covertly at home or in alleyways. "If someone reported us, we'd pick up the food and run, like a grasshopper," he said.  

"People would come to me, begging me to sell to them. I could ask for whatever price I wanted," he said. Mr Kim found himself richer than ever before. He and his wife could afford to eat stew for dinner, with any meat of their choosing.

"That counts as eating very well in North Korea."

The life Mr Kim describes paints a picture of an exceptionally savvy and, at times, unscrupulous businessman. Now in his 30s, he hustled and saved for more than a decade, finding ways to outsmart the North Korean system.

 This was partly because he became disillusioned with the system at a young age. From as early as he can , he and his father would sit watching South Korean TV in secret. They lived so close to the border they could tune into the channels on their set. Mr Kim became captivated by a country where people were free. 

 As he got older, the corruption and injustice he witnessed in the North began to chip away at him. He recalled one incident where security officials raided his home. "Everything you have belongs to the state," they said. "You think this oxygen is yours":[]}