Nothing to envy. Ordinary lives in North Korea.

Occasionally, door frames and window sashes are painted a startling turquoise, but mostly everything is whitewashed or gray.
In the futuristic dystopia imagined in 1984, George Orwell wrote of a world where the only color to be found was in the propaganda posters. Such is the case in North Korea. Images of Kim Il-sung are depicted in the vivid poster colors favored by the Socialist Realism style of painting.

“Those who write in accordance with the party’s intention are heroes,” Kim Jong-il proclaimed.

North Korea invites parody. We laugh at the excesses of the propaganda and the gullibility of the people. But consider that their indoctrination began in infancy, during the fourteen-hour days spent in factory day-care centers; that for the subsequent fifty years, every song, film, newspaper article, and billboard was designed to deify Kim Il-sung; that the country was hermetically sealed to keep out anything that might cast doubt on Kim Il-sung’s divinity. Who could possibly resist?

To a certain extent, all dictatorships are alike. From Stalin’s Soviet Union to Mao’s China, from Ceauşescu’s Romania to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, all these regimes had the same trappings: the statues looming over every town square, the portraits hung in every office, the wristwatches with the dictator’s face on the dial.

Driving through the North Korean countryside, you could clearly see the contrast between the private gardens bursting with vegetables, bean poles soaring skyward, vines drooping with pumpkins, next to the collective fields with their stunted, haphazard rows of corn that had been planted by so-called volunteers doing their patriotic duty.

It cost 25 won to buy a kilo of rice that might cost less than one tenth of a won from the distribution center.

For the most part, North Koreans were stoical about enduring pain during medical treatment. “They weren’t like South Koreans, who scream and holler about the slightest little thing,” Dr. Kim said.

Ten morderca ma również inne kierunki działania. Uderza przede wszystkim w najsłabszych – dzieci poniżej piątego roku życia. Zwykłe przeziębienie zamienia się w zapalenie płuc; biegunka w dyzenterię. Zanim rodzice pomyślą o pomocy, dziecko nie żyje. Kolejnym kierunkiem są starsi ludzie, zaczyna od siedemdziesięciolatków, a następnie ulegają mu sześćdziesięcio- i pięćdziesięciolatkowie. Każdy i tak prędzej czy później umiera, ale dlaczego tak szybko? Głód zabija również ludzi w sile wieku. Mężczyźni, ponieważ mają mniej tkanki tłuszczowej niż kobiety, zwykle umierają przed nimi. Silne i atletyczne osoby są szczególnie narażone, ponieważ ich metabolizm potrzebuje więcej kalorii.

IN A FAMINE, people don’t necessarily starve to death. Often some other ailment gets them first. Chronic malnutrition impairs the body’s ability to battle infection and the hungry become increasingly susceptible to tuberculosis and typhoid. The starved body is too weak to metabolize antibiotics, even if they are available, and normally curable illnesses suddenly become fatal. Wild fluctuations of body chemistry can trigger strokes and heart attacks. People die from eating substitute foods that their bodies can’t digest. Starvation can be a sneaky killer that disguises itself under bland statistics of increased child mortality or decreased life expectancy. It leaves behind only circumstantial evidence of “excess mortality” - statistics that show higher than normal deaths during a certain period.

The killer has a natural progression. It goes first for the most vulnerable - children under five. They come down with a cold and it turns into pneumonia; diarrhea turns into dysentery. Before the parents even think about getting help, the child is dead. Next the killer turns to the aged, starting with those over seventy, then working its way down the decades to people in their sixties and fifties. These people might have died anyway, but so soon? Then starvation makes its way through people in the prime of their lives. Men, because they have less body fat, usually perish before women. The strong and athletic are especially vulnerable because their metabolisms burn more calories.

Jest jeszcze innego rodzaju okrucieństwo: głód zabija porządnych ludzi, takich, którzy nigdy nie ukradną żywności, nie skłamią, nie oszukują, nie łamią prawa ani nie zdradzają najbliższych. To zjawisko po II wojnie światowej opisał włoski pisarz żydowskiego pochodzenia Primo Levi. Pisał, że ani on ani jego koledzy, którzy przeżyli obozy zagłady, nie chcieli spotykać się po wojnie, ponieważ wstydzili się tego co zrobili.

Yet another gratuitous cruelty : the killer [the famine] targets the most innocent, the people who would never steal food, lie, cheat, break the law, or betray a friend. It was a phenomenon that the Italian-Jewish writer Primo Levi identified after emerging from Auschwitz, when he wrote that he and his fellow survivors never wanted to see one another again after the war because they had all done something of which they were ashamed.

Attention was lavished on the private plots, the vegetables in rows as perfectly even as typewriter keys, the beans and squash tied to stakes and trellises, while the collective farms were slovenly with neglect.

It was a crime to accept remuneration for any service – be it sex or bicycle repair. But who cared anymore? Everybody needed a scam to survive.

Now she saw the rich getting richer; the poor getting poorer.

“Any citizen of the Republic who flees to a foreign country or to the side of an enemy, including the seeking of asylum in a foreign embassy… (or) assists an agency or citizens of a hostile country, by serving as a travel guide or interpreter, or by providing moral or material support… shall be subject to the death penalty.”

He warned that the rise of private markets and trading would cause the Workers’ Party to “collapse and dissolve… [as] illustrated by past incidents in Poland and Czechoslovakia.”

The teachers were all intellectuals in their fifties, who discovered they had no marketable skills after the school system stopped paying their salaries.

She received an education through the benevolence of the party and she betrayed the fatherland.

He had been every inch the indecisive intellectual, weighing every move until it was too late.

For one North Korean student it was a photograph in the official media showing a South Korean on a picket line. The photograph was meant to illustrate the exploitation of the worker in capitalist society; instead the student noticed that the “oppressed” worker wore a jacket with a zipper and had a ballpoint pen in his pocket, both of which were luxuries at the time.

Even though he hated the North Korean regime, he found he’d get defensive when South Koreans criticized it.

His legs were underdeveloped and his head too large for his body - a physique typical of people who have been deprived of food during their formative years. When denied nutrition, the body directs its resources toward the head and torso at the expense of the limbs. In famine literature, the syndrome is called “stunting.” A 2003 study by the World Food Programme and UNICEF found that 42 percent of North Korean children were permanently damaged in this way.

If there is no plausible excuse, the party has said simply that people shouldn't buy products "made in China" because they need to support their own North Korean goods. "We're supposed to be buying North Korean products instead of Chinese. But North Korea doesn't make anything - it all comes from China - so there is nothing to buy," said a frustrated North Korean businessman I interviewed in China in 2009. "Our general wants to bring back socialism the way it used to be."

Jak dotąd władze Korei Północnej przeprowadziły taki manewr pięć razy – poprzednio w roku 1992. Tym razem jednak ludzie pracujący na wolnym rynku dysponowali pewnymi oszczędnościami, w związku z czym to, co moglibyśmy określić mianem rodzącej się klasy średniej, zostało z dnia na dzień całkowicie zlikwidowane.

„Nie wiem, jak to wytłumaczyć. Zupełnie jakby miała mi pęknąć głowa. W jeden dzień straciliśmy wszystkie nasze pieniądze. Z powodu szoku niektórzy trafili do szpitala” – to słowa siedemnastolatki, z którą rozmawiałam w marcu w ramach wywiadów, jakie prowadziłam po chińskiej stronie granicy z osobami przybyłymi z Korei Północnej. Dziewczyna ta opuściła kraj trzy tygodnie wcześniej.

Until recently, people were managing to outwit the police, keeping whatever was banned under the table, or moving their wares before an inspection. But that changed in late 2009, when the Workers' Party pulled out its heavy artillery. On November 30, the party announced that it would invalidate all of the currency in circulation and issue new bills. The ostensible reason was to prevent inflation by knocking off two zeroes from the won, which was trading at the time at 3,500 to the U.S. dollar, in order to "strengthen the national currency and stabilize the circulation of money," an official of the Workers' Party explained. In fact it was a trick. The North Korean regime wanted to confiscate the cash that had been accumulated by people working in the market. The rules limited people to trading no more than 100,000 won for the new currency, which meant that nobody would have more than about $30 to their name.

The North Korean regime had pulled this same currency stunt five times before, most recently in 1992, but this time people who'd been working at the markets had accumulated some savings, so what existed of a nascent middle class was wiped out overnight.

"I don't know how to explain it. It was as though your head would burst. In one day all your money was lost. People were taken to the hospital in shock," a seventeen-year-old girl from Musan told me in March, when I was on the Chinese side of the border interviewing those recently arrived from North Korea. The girl had come out three weeks earlier.

People were told they would be able to buy whatever they needed at very reduced prices from the state-run stores; supposedly rice that had previously cost 2,500 won would be available with the new currency for 25 won. But the government stores had no rice, corn, flour, or cooking oil to sell.