‘Now I Know What Freedom Is’: One Young Man’s Escape From North Korea

Observers first see Ilhyeok Kim’s joyful, room-lighting smile before they notice he is relatively short—because he is North Korean defector short.

“For me, freedom means that when I want to do something, I’ll do it, and if I don’t want to do something, I don’t have to do it,” Kim told The Daily Signal last month at an event in Washington hosted by the group Liberty in North Korea.

“Now I know what freedom is,” he added.

When he escaped communist North Korea at 17 years old and made his way to South Korea, Kim weighed less than 88 pounds and stood 4-foot-11. The average 17-year-old male in South Korea weighs 138 pounds and stands 5-foot-8.

Most North Koreans are 5 inches shorter and 15 pounds lighter than South Koreans because they grow up knowing hunger and hard labor under the communist regime.

“In North Korea, whatever you harvest on your farm is the government’s to take,” Kim, now 24, said. “The regime didn’t care if its citizens died from starvation. Usually, we were only given enough rations to survive for two months. Then the hunger would set in.”

Kim was born into punishment under North Korean law for a crime he didn’t commit.

“My father stole [military] food and grains from a general food storage area,” he told The Daily Signal.

Barely any food was available in his hometown of Saebyul from February to June each year, Kim said, and his father and his father’s friends stole food from the government in 1991 because they were starving.

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