Book : Escape from Camp 14

The heart wrenching New York Times bestseller about the only known person born inside a North Korean prison camp to have escaped.

North Korea's political prison camps have existed for the last 50+ years. The South Korean government estimates that there are about one hundred and fifty-four thousand prisoners in the camps. There are six camps, according to South Korea’s intelligence agency.  Camp 14 is 48 km long and 24 km wide, with electrified, barbed-wire fences – reinforced by guard towers and patrolled by armed men – encircle the camp. It holds an estimated fifteen thousand prisoners. Within Camp 14, it has farms, mines and factories threaded through steep mountain valleys. It is like an open air cage. No one born and raised in these camps is known to have escaped. No one, that is, except Shin Dong-hyuk.

In Escape From Camp 14, former Washington Post journalist, Blaine Harden unlocks the secrets of the world's most repressive totalitarian state and horrific life in Camp 14 through the story of Shin's shocking imprisonment and his astounding getaway. Shin knew nothing of civilized existence - he has no sense of love, he saw his mother as a competitor for food, guards raised him to be a snitch, and he witnessed the execution of his mother and brother.

Harden's book focuses on an extraordinary young man who came of age inside the highest security prison in the highest security state. Escape from Camp 14 offers an unequalled inside account of one of the world's darkest nations. It is a tale of endurance and courage, survival and hope.

Some quotes from the book:

1.
Catching and roasting rats became a passion for Shin. He caught them in his house, in the fields and in the privy. He would meet his friends in the evening at his primary school, where there was a coal grill to roast them. Shin peeled away their skin, scraped away their innards, salted what was left and chewed the rest – flesh, bones and tiny feet

Every year North Korea needs to produce more than five million tons of rice and cereal grain to feed its twenty-three million people. Nearly every year it falls short, usually by about a million tons. Famine in the mid-1990s killed perhaps a million North Koreans.

2.
He had been trained by guards and teachers to believe that every time he was beaten, he deserved it – because of the treasonous blood he had inherited from his parents. Shin spent all five years of primary school in class with this same teacher, who was in his early thirties, wore a uniform and carried a pistol in a holster on his hip. In breaks between classes, he allowed students to play ‘rock, paper, scissors’. On Saturdays, he would sometimes grant children an hour or two to pick lice out of each other’s hair. Shin never learned his name.

Trust among friends was poisoned by constant competition for food and the pressure to snitch. Trying to win extra food rations, children told teachers and guards what their neighbours were eating, wearing and saying.

During ‘weeding combat’, which occurred between June and August, primary school students worked from four in the morning until dusk pulling weeds in corn, bean and sorghum fields.

Shin entered his first coal mine at the age of ten. He and five of his classmates (three boys and three girls, including his neighbour Moon Sung Sim) walked down a steep shaft to the face of the mine. Their job was to load coal into two-ton ore cars and push them uphill on a narrow rail track to a staging area.

3.
North Korea called itself the Worker’s Paradise, but even as it professed allegiance to communist ideals of equality, it invented one of the world’s most rigidly stratified caste systems.

Guards could win admission to college if they caught an inmate trying to escape – an incentive system that ambitious guards seized upon. Sometimes they would enable prisoners to make an escape attempt, An said, and shoot them before they reached the fences that surround the camps.

The core of the core live in Pyongyang in large apartments or single-family homes located in gated neighbourhoods. Outsiders do not know with any certainty how many of these elite there are in North Korea, but South Korean and American scholars believe they are a tiny fraction of the country’s population, numbering between one and two hundred thousand out of twenty-three million.

Elites have relatively large apartments and access to rice. They are also granted first dibs on imported luxuries such as fruit and alcohol. But for residents of Pyongyang, electricity is intermittent at best, hot water is rarely available and travel outside the country is difficult except for diplomats and state-sponsored businessmen.

The exception, of course, is the Kim family dynasty. Satellite images of the family’s residences stand out like sable-clad thumbs in the mangy landscape of North Korea. The family maintains at least eight country houses, according to books by his former chef and a former bodyguard. Nearly all of them have cinemas, basketball courts and shooting ranges. Several have indoor swimming pools, along with entertainment centres for bowling and rollerskating. Satellite pictures show a full-size horse racing track, a private train station and a water park.

About sixty per cent of Shin’s class was assigned to the coal mines, where accidental death from cave-ins, explosions and gas poisonings was common. Many miners developed black lung disease after ten to fifteen years of working underground. Most miners died in their forties, if not before. As Shin understood it, an assignment in the mines was a death sentence.

In late 1998, a few months before Shin was assigned to the pig farm, the World Food Programme conducted a nutrition survey of children, which covered seventy per cent of North Korea. It found that about two thirds of those surveyed were stunted or underweight. The numbers were double that of Angola, then at the end of a long civil war, and the North Korean government became furious when they were released to the public.

In those camps, researchers found, the ‘basic unit of survival’ was the pair, not the individual.
‘[I]t was in the pairs that the prisoners kept alive the semblance of humanity,’ concluded Elmer Luchterhand, a sociologist at Yale who interviewed fifty-two concentration camp survivors shortly after liberation.

Their plan was simple – and insanely optimistic.
Shin knew the camp. Park knew the world. Shin would get them over the fence. Park would lead them to China, where his uncle would give them shelter, money and assistance in travelling on to South Korea.

Making a calculation that was short on information and long on aspiration, Shin told himself he had a ninety per cent chance of getting through the fence and a ten per cent chance of getting shot.

Hanawon, which means ‘House of Unity’ in Korean was built in 1999 by the Ministry of Unification to house, feed and teach North Korean defectors how to adjust and survive in the South’s ultra-competitive capitalist culture. To that end, the centre has a staff of psychologists, career counsellors and teachers of everything from world history to driving. There are also doctors, nurses and dentists. During their three-month stay, defectors learn their rights under South Korean law and go on field trips to shopping centres, banks and subway stations.

During his first month at Hanawon, he received documents and photo identification that certified his South Korean citizenship, which the government automatically bestows on all those who flee the North. He also attended classes that explained the many government benefits and programmes offered to defectors, including a free apartment, an eight-hundred-dollar-a-month settlement stipend for two years and as much as eighteen thousand dollars if he stuck with job training or higher education.

 Studies have found that they are slow to socialize and often avoid contact with others for two to three years after arriving in the South.

Shin was by no means the first camp survivor from the North to be greeted with a collective yawn by the South Korean public.

Shin exaggerated the South’s lack of concern about the North, but he had a valid point. It’s a blind spot that baffles local and international human rights groups. Overwhelming evidence of continuing atrocities inside the North’s labour camps has done little to rouse the South Korean public.

When South Korean President Lee Myung-bak was elected in 2007, just three per cent of voters named North Korea as a primary concern. They told pollsters that their primary interest was in making higher salaries.

After international investigators confirmed that a North Korean torpedo sank the Cheonan, voters in the South refused to rally around President Lee, who had said the North Korean government should ‘pay a price’. There was no South Korean version of the ‘9/11’ effect that propelled the United States into wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Instead, Lee’s party was routed in a midterm election that showed South Koreans were more interested in preserving peace and protecting living standards than in teaching the North a lesson.

Bloody surprise attacks from the North have a way of recurring every ten to fifteen years, from the 1968 raid by a hit squad that tried to assassinate a South Korean president, to the 1987 bombing of a Korean Air passenger jet and the failed 1996 submarine infiltration by special forces commandos, to the 2010 sinking of the warship and the shelling of the island.

Even South Koreans themselves struggle mightily to fit into their own success-obsessed, status-conscious, education-crazed culture. Shin was attempting to find his way in a society that is singularly overworked, insecure and stressed out. South Koreans work more, sleep less and kill themselves at a higher rate than citizens of any other developed country, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a group that supports sustainable economic growth in thirty-four wealthy countries.


Shin had not figured out how to pay his bills, make a living, or find a girlfriend in South Korea, but he had decided what he wanted to do with the rest of his life: he would be a human rights activist and raise international awareness about the existence of the labour camps.

To that end, he intended to leave South Korea and move to the United States. He had accepted an offer from Liberty in North Korea, the non-profit organization that sponsored his first American trip. He was moving to Southern California.

‘Shin is still a prisoner,’ said Andy Kim, a young Korean American who helped run LiNK and who, for a time, was Shin’s closest confidant. ‘He cannot enjoy his life when there are people suffering in the camps. He sees happiness as selfishness.’

‘Sometimes Shin sees himself through the eyes of his new self, and sometimes he sees himself through the eyes of the guards in the camp,’ said Andy. ‘He is kind of here and kind of there.’


His behaviour was consistent with a pattern that researchers have found among concentration camp survivors the world over. They often move through life with what Harvard psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman calls a ‘contaminated identity’.

Watch the entire interview with Shin Dong-hyuk below: