By Kang Chol-Hwan
This is the survival story of Kang Chol-Hwan's 10 years in the North Korean Gulag. His family's story starts in Japan, where they were wealthy and his grandmother was a staunch North Korean communist. Her fervor for her beliefs drew them, along with helpful propaganda, to abandon their life of freedom and material comforts to the lies of North Korean communism. The aquariums in the title are a symbol of his lost life in North Korea where he had wall to wall aquariums with exotic fish until he was taken to the camp.
Interesting to note - George W. Bush read this book and summoned him to the white house to discuss the gulags. Perhaps influencing North Korea to be included in the Axis of Evil speech?
"At the age of nine, I had been taken to one of them in Yodok, South-Hamkyung Province, due to my parent's alleged guilt by association to my grandfather. I was destined to spend ten years of grim existence there." Page vii
"Now the term ' concentration camp' has become inextricably linked to HItler's holocaust. But how on earth could I ever explain that the same - and in fact far worse - things are being repeated in this twenty-first century in North Korea, a relic of a failed experiment in human history called communism?" Page xii
"To my childish eyes and to those of all my friends, Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il were perfect beings, untarnished by any base human function. I was convinced, as we all were, that neither of them urinated or defecated. Who could imagine such things of the gods?" Page 3
"His story . . . mostly demonstrates the force of human illusion and its awesome power to render us utterly blind." Page 24
"But that first day of class remains a horrible memory. I felt something tear inside me then - something that connected me to the only other life I had known." Page 66
"There was no such thing as individual responsibility: one's work only counted as part of the collective output." Page 72
"The irredeemables were all lifers. They knew they were never leaving the camp. No matter how long their hearts continued to pump, or their lungs to breathe, they would never again live as citizens. Their children, too, would suffer this fate. As the official propaganda never tired of remind us, it was necessary to 'desiccate the seedlings of counterrevolution, pull them out by their roots, exterminate every last one of them.' That's the actual word the North Korean authorities used: exterminate - myulhada. These prisoners were tossed into a world of phantoms and nonentities, a world so devoid of hope it didn't even require its citizens to display portraits of Kim Jong-il or the learn the 'lessons of Kim Il-sung's Revolution,' or attend sessions for criticism and self-criticism." Page 79
"The sweatbox breaks even the sturdiest of constitutions. It is possible to survive it, but the cost is often crippling and the aftereffects are almost always permanent. It is simply grisly: the privation of food; close confinement, crouching on one's knees, hands on thighs, unable to move. The prisoner's rear end presses into his heels so unrelentingly that the buttocks turns solid black with bruising. Hardly anyone exited the sweatbox on his own two feet. If the prisoner needed to relieve himself, he raised his left hand; if he was sick, he raised his right hand. No other gestures were allowed. No other movements. No words. . . . If he talked, he was beaten; if he moved, he was beaten." Page 96
"Poor woman. She had given everything she had to communism. For fifteen or sixteen years she militated for its ideas, believing she was realizing them in her beloved homeland. And this same country had taken away the man she loved and sent her and her family to a camp. She felt so guilty that she couldn't stop asking for our forgiveness. Yet it was the lamentation and regrets - coming from a woman who was once so indomitable and strong - that really shook us to our core." Page 98
"And yet our hunger remained, piercing, draining." Page 104
"I began to see them [rats] as useful, even precious, on par with chickens and rabbits. I was truly grateful for their existence, and still am. Absurd though it may seem to those who have never known hunger, I actually felt a connection with them." Page 116
"These memories come back to me whenever I go skiing and see high, snow-covered mountains with sheer black crags. I try to explain my feelings to my South Korean friends, but have little success. Where they see an ideal landscape, I see the natural barriers of Yodok, a place conceived for human misery, whose gloom still has the power to overwhelm me." Page 118
"So do I dare admit it? Some mysterious bond had come to attach me to that place." Page 125
"I attended some fifteen executions during my time in Yodok." Page 141
"Hunger quashes man's will to help his fellow man. I've seen fathers steal food from their own children's lunch boxes. As they scarf down the corn, they have only one overpowering desire: to placate, if even for just one moment, that feeling of insufferable need." Page 141
"The death of compassion was responsible for worse acts than this." Page 143
"A clear-eyed view of the hell I had landed in certainly would have thrown me deeper into despair. There is nothing like thought to deepen one's gloom." Page 152
"My most poignant memories were attached to the place where I had suffered the most. It was a strange, complicated feeling, for Yodok was still a hellish, inhuman place." Page 158
"The only lesson I got pounded into me was about man's limitless capacity for vice - that and the fact that social distinctions vanish in a concentration camp. I once believed that man was different from other animals, but Yodok showed me that reality doesn't support this opinion. In the camp, there was no difference between man and beast, except maybe that a very hungry human was capable of stealing food from its little ones while an animal, perhaps was not." Page 159
"Listening to the radio [South Korean] gave us the words we needed to express our dissatisfaction. Every program, each new discovery, helped us tear a little freer from the enveloping web of deception." Page 185
"It's clear: North Korea is a total sham." Page 195
Book 40
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