SHIN DONG-HYUK grew up in North Korea's Camp 14, one of
the monstrous slave-labor prison complexes in which the world's most tyrannical
regime has crushed hundreds of thousands of its citizens, working them to death
in conditions of excruciating brutality and degradation. Though the North
Korean concentration camps have lasted far longer than their Soviet or Nazi counterparts
did, Shin is the first person born and raised in one of them to have
successfully escaped abroad. His story is told in journalist Blaine Harden's
Escape from Camp 14, a heart-crushing reminder that man's inhumanity to man has
no limit.
It is a book filled with harrowing passages. At the age
of six, Shin was forced to watch as one of his classmates -- a short, slight,
pretty girl -- was beaten to death by their teacher when he discovered five
kernels of corn in her pocket. When Shin accidentally dropped a sewing machine
while working at the camp's garment factory, half of his middle finger was
chopped off as punishment. Time and again he sees other inmates maimed or
killed when they are forced to work under appallingly dangerous conditions. And
time and again he joins in collective punishment, unhesitatingly obeying when
ordered to slap and beat a classmate or some other prisoner singled out for
abuse and discipline.
When Shin was 14, he witnessed the execution of his
mother and brother for attempting to escape. His dominant emotion as he watched
them die was not sorrow, but anger: He was furious at what they had caused him
to be put through. Because of their infraction, he had been savagely tortured,
suspended in mid-air over a charcoal fire as interrogators demanded information
about where his mother and brother were planning to flee after their escape.
"Shin, crazed with pain, smelling his burning flesh,
twisted away from the heat," Harden writes. "One of the guards
grabbed a gaff hook from the wall and pierced the boy in the lower abdomen,
holding him over the fire until he lost consciousness."
North Korea's slave-labor gulag would be horrific even if
its inmates were guilty of actual crimes. But most prisoners are guilty of
nothing except being related to the wrong family.
Under a demented doctrine laid down by Kim Il Sung, the
communist tyrant who founded North Korea, "enemies of class … must be
eliminated through three generations." The regime therefore fills these
unspeakable camps not only with "enemies" who dared to practice
Christianity or failed to keep a picture of Kim properly dusted, but with their
entire families, often including grandparents and grandchildren. Shin's father
ended up in Camp 14 because two of his brothers had fled south during the
Korean War. He and Shin's mother were assigned to each other by camp guards
years later as prizes in a "reward" marriage. They were allowed to
sleep together just five nights a year. Shin was thus conceived -- and spent
the first 23 years of his life -- behind the electrified barbed wire of Kim's
ghastly hellhole.
Harden's book is gripping and enlightening. Yet not even
the most gifted writer can fully convey what it means to grow up in a Camp 14
-- a realm in which "love and mercy and family were words without
meaning," in which betrayal was routine and compassion unknown. How does a
human being overcome such damage? Grisly physical scars mark Shin's body,
Harden writes, but there are severe psychological scars too. He struggles to
show affection and to trust other people; to be capable of sympathy and
sadness.
How could it be otherwise? After a lifetime of
dehumanization and institutionalized cruelty, Shin can hardly be blamed if he
wrestles with emotional paralysis.
But what excuse do we have? We who know what freedom and
civilization mean, who live with law and justice and decency, who intone
"Never Again" after accounts of genocide and holocaust -- how do we
justify our emotional paralysis?
There is no cruelty so depraved that people cannot be
induced to do it, or to look the other way while it is being done. Escape from
Camp 14 reconfirms what we have known for years: North Korea's rulers brutalize
their people with unparalleled and bloody barbarity. Why do we find it so easy
to look the other way?
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