This
young man who spent the first 22 years of his life in a North Korean prison, is
touring the US and sharing his life story. His experiences were like that
of a mediaeval torture chamber.
If I teach the "North Korea" course again, I will include more about the North Korean prisons. They've lasted longer than Nazi Camps and Russian Gulags, and are much the same today.
Richard MacIntyre
Escape from Camp 14
This true story of life in a North Korean prison camp may be the most disturbing book that you will ever read.
Escape from Camp 14 is the most devastating book I
have ever read. Perhaps the resilience of youth got me through the aftermath of
learning about slavery, the Holocaust, even Iris Chang’s
now-classic “The Rape of Nanking:
The Forgotten Holocaust,” the title I previously held as the most horrific
testimony of inhumanity.
More recently, I cried through 2010 National Book Award nonfiction finalist Barbara Demick’s “Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea.” I ignorantly questioned the veracity of the torturous conditions in Adam Johnson’s recent, deservedly bestselling novel “The Orphan Master’s Son.” I paid attention to headlines about North Korea’s potential nuclear threats and the succession of Kim Jong Eun to the mythic Kim Dynasty.
But nothing prepared me for the odyssey of North Korean Shin Dong-Hyuk as told by journalist Blaine Harden, former Washington Post bureau chief for East Asia, Eastern Europe, and Africa. Shin, who changed his name “after arriving in South Korea, an attempt to reinvent himself as a free man,” is the only known North Korean who was born in a prison camp to have escaped and survived.
Shin’s story is vastly different from that of other survivors; as Blaine chillingly reveals, it doesn’t fit “a conventional narrative arc [of survival]” which includes a loving family, a comfortable home, a sense of community governed by moral principles, from which the protagonist is brutally torn. In utter contrast, Shin began his life barely human: his prisoner parents were arbitrarily paired by guards to breed, whatever offspring they produced would become slaves who would work and die in Camp 14, considered “[b]y reputation ... the toughest” of the country’s six known camps.
Shin experienced no familial bonds. His mother was nothing more than competition for food. He barely saw his older brother and father. He described himself “as a predator who had been bred in the camp to inform on family and friends – and feel no remorse.” Preying equaled survival. Only much later would Shin learn the criminal history of his family: “The unforgivable crime Shin’s father had committed was being the brother of two young men who had fled south during [the Korean War]... Shin’s unforgivable crime was being his father’s son.”
At 4, he witnessed his first execution. At 6, he watched a classmate beaten to death for having five grains of corn in her pocket. At 14, he survived heinous torture, then witnessed his mother being hung and his brother shot. At 22, he lost a finger as punishment for dropping a sewing machine.
At 23, on January 2, 2005, Shin climbed over the electrified
corpse of his fellow escapee, and began a labyrinthine journey toward freedom.
His own slight body bears innumerable scars of mutilation. When he escaped, he
knew virtually nothing of the outside world, yet he miraculously traversed
North Korea, China, South Korea, and
finally made his way to the United States.
To call Shin’s adjustment to his new life "difficult" is grave understatement: “’I escaped physically … I haven’t escaped psychologically.’” Defectors understandably suffer from a myriad of clinical symptoms including post-traumatic syndrome, paranoia, paralyzing survival guilt. Shin struggles at an even more basic level: “’I am evolving from being an animal ... [b]ut it is going very, very slowly.’”
As horrific as Shin’s ordeals have been, “’Shin had a relatively
comfortable life by the standards of other children in the camps,’” a former
camp guard and driver told Harden. Others have endured “worse hardship.”
Compounding such stomach-churning news is the realization that “[t]he camps
have barely pricked the world’s collective conscience.” They hold 200,000
prisoners according to the US State
Department and several human rights groups; they have lasted twice as long
as the Soviet Gulag, and 12 times longer than the Nazi concentration camps. Google Earth
provides high-resolution satellite photographs “to anyone with an Internet
connection.” Amnesty
International has documented new construction in the camps as recently as
2011.
A book without parallel, “Escape from Camp 14” is a riveting
nightmare that bears witness to the worst inhumanity, an unbearable tragedy
magnified by the fact that the horror continues at this very moment without an
end in sight. Inspired by Harden's front-page Washington Post story in
December, 2008 – the article from which this book originated – a reader
addresses a chilling question to all of us: “’High school students in America
debate why President
Franklin D. Roosevelt didn’t bomb all the rail lines to Hitler’s camps …
Their children may ask, a generation from now, why the West stared at far
clearer satellite images of Kim Jong Il’s
camps, and did nothing.’”Terry Hong writes BookDragon, a book review blog for the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program.
Related stories
Nothing to Envy
All Woman and Springtime
New book: Defector tells of shopping in Europe for North Korean Dictators
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