At the age of 13 Yeonmi Park fled North Korea, led by people traffickers across a frozen river to a perilous future. Her new book, In Order To Live, is testimony to the incredible resilience of the human spirit. In this extract Yeonmi recalls the years of hunger, fear and increasing desperation that drove her and her mother to risk their lives for freedom.

By Yeonmi Park, Friday 25 September 2015

On the cold, black night of March 31, 2007 my mother and I scrambled down the steep, rocky bank of the frozen Yalu river, which divides North Korea and China. There were patrols above us and below, and guard posts 100 yards on either side of us manned by soldiers ready to shoot anyone attempting to cross the border. We had no idea what would come next, but we were desperate to get to China, where there might be a chance to survive.

I was 13 years old and weighed a little over four stone. Only a week earlier, I had been in a hospital in my hometown of Hyesan along the Chinese border, suffering from a severe intestinal infection that the doctors had mistakenly diagnosed as appendicitis. I was still in terrible pain from the incision.

The young North Korean smuggler who was guiding us across the border insisted we had to go that night. He had paid some guards to look the other way, but he couldn’t bribe all the soldiers in the area, so we had to be extremely cautious. I followed him in the darkness, but I was so unsteady that I had to scoot down the bank on my bottom, sending small avalanches of rocks crashing ahead of me. He turned and whispered angrily at me to stop making so much noise.

It was early spring, and the weather was getting warmer, melting patches of the frozen river. The place where we crossed was steep and narrow, and as it was protected from the sun, it was still solid enough to hold our weight – we hoped. Our guide made a phone call to someone on the other side, the Chinese side, and then whispered, ‘Run!’

The guide started running, but my feet would not move and I clung to my mother. I was so scared that I was completely paralysed. The guide ran back for us, grabbed my hands, and dragged me across the ice. When we reached solid ground, we started running and did not stop until we were out of sight of the border guards.