One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West
By Blaine Harden
This story broke my heart and challenged me in a lot of ways. I can't believe at my age and with the kind of things that I am interested and (thought) I was aware of that I didn't know this kind of horror was taking place in North Korea right now. It is a Gulag. Worse, it is a place where children are born and raised (due to a three generations rule about punishment). I can't imagine growing up in a horrible situation with such depth of distrust that you cannot rely on your own mother. I can't imagine the hunger and the culture of fear forced upon someone from birth. How can they rise above this? I give so much respect to Shin, who struggles to do this and I think does.
"Before then, no one born in a North Korean political prison camp had ever escaped. As far as can be determined, Shin is still the only one to do it. He was twenty-three years old and knew no one outside the fence." Page 1
"Unlike those who have survived a concentration camp, Shin had not been torn away from a civilized existence and forced to descend into hell. He was born and raised there. He accepted its values. He called it home." Page 3
"Kim Il Sung laid down the law in 1972: "Enemies of class, whoever they are, their seed must be eliminated through three generations." Pg 5
"Fact checking is not possible in North Korea." Pg 10
"But that was in retrospect. That was before he learned that a civilized child should love his mother. When he was in camp - depending on her for all his meals, stealing her food, enduring her beatings - he saw her as competition for survival." Page 15
"They said that women who had sex with guards in an attempt to get more food or easier work knew that the risks were high. If they became pregnant, they disappeared." Page 16
After being severely tortured he was put in a cell with "Uncle."
"The old man's medical skills and his caring words kept the boy alive. His fever waned, his mind cleared and his burns congealed into scars.
It was Shin's first exposure to sustained kindness, and he was grateful beyond words. But he also found it puzzling. He had not trusted his mother to keep him from starving. At school, he trusted no one, with the possible exception of Hong Sung Jo, and informed on everyone. In return he expected betrayal. In the cell, Uncle slowly reconfigured those expectations." Page 61
"Shin did ot want to leave the cell. He had never trusted - never loved - anyone before. In the years ahead, he would think of the old man in the dark room far more often and with far greater affection than he thought of his parents. But after guards led him out of the cell and locked its doors, he never saw Uncle again." Page 63
"Shin had become conscious of what he could never eat and never see. The filth, stink, and bleakness of the camp crushed his spirit. As he became marginally self aware, he discovered loneliness, regret and longing." Page 71
"Suicide is a powerful temptation for North Koreans plucked out of ordinary lives and subjected to the labor camps' regime of hard labor, hunger and sleep deprivation." Page 71
"A perverse benefit of birth in the camp was a complete absence of expectations." Page 72
"To that fantastical end, the government regularly enlists the masses in miserable tasks dressed up in noble slogans. The propaganda can be quite creative: the famine was repackaged as the 'Arduous March,' a patriotic struggle that North Koreans were encouraged to win with the inspiring slogan: 'Let's Eat Two Meals Per Day.'" Page 77
"Intoxicated by what he heard from the prisoner he was supposed to betray, Shin made perhaps the first free decision of his life. He chose not to snitch." Page 99
"Trust was a good way to get shot." Page 100
"Despite Park's anger - at the rottenness of North Korea, at his wife, at himself - he always carried himself with dignity, especially when it was time to eat.
Shin found this utterly amazing. Everyone he knew in the camp behaved like a panicked animal at mealtimes. Park, even when hungry, did not." Page 102
"Shin had never sung a song. His only exposure to music had been on the farm, when trucks with loudspeakers played martial music while prisoners picked weeds. To Shin, singing seemed unnatural and instantly risky." Page 102
"Park made those thoughts possible. He changed the way Shin connected with other people. Their friendship broke a lifelong pattern - stretching back to Shin's malignant relationship with his mother - of wariness and betrayal.
Shin was no longer a creature of his captors. He believed he had found someone to help him survive.
Their relationship echoed, in many ways, the bonds of trust and mutual protection that kept prisoners alive and sane in Nazi concentration camps. In those camps, researchers found, the 'basic unit of survival' was the pair, not the individual." Page 104
"Camp 14 is a fifty-year old Skinner box an ongoing longitudinal experiment in repression and mind control in which guards breed prisoners whom they control, isolate, and pit against one another from birth.
The miracle of Shin's friendship with Park is how quickly it blew up the box.
Park's spirit, his dignity, and his incendiary information gave Shin something that was both enthralling and unbearable: a context to dream about the future.
He suddenly understood where he was and what he was missing.
Camp14 was no longer home. It was an abhorrent cage." age 105
"By any measure, these expectations were absurd. No one had escaped from Camp 14. Indeed, just two people other than Shin are known to have escaped from any political prison camp in North Korea and made it to the West. One is Kim Yong, the former lieutenant colonel who had highly places friends across North Korea." Page 107
"The human body is unpredictable when it comes to conducting electricity." Page 115
"Uniforms are everywhere in North Korea, the world's most militarized society. Conscription is almost universal. Men serve ten years, women seven." Page 118
"The word Shin uses again and again to describe those first days is 'shock'." Page 120
His random encounter with the person who would help him get to South Korea. Page 156
"In addition to being paranoid, confused and intermittently technophobic, defectors tend to suffer from preventable diseases and conditions that are all but nonexistent in South Korea. The head nurse at Hanawon for the past decade, Chun Jung-hee, told me that a high percentage of women form the North have chronic gynecological infections and cysts. She said many defectors arrive infected with tuberculosis that has never been treated with antibiotics. They also commonly arrive with chronic indigestion and hepatitis B." Page 163
"South Koreans want reunification with the North, but they do not want it right away. Many do not want it during their lifetimes - largely because the cost would be unacceptably high." Page 171
"South Koreans work more, sleep less, and kill themselves at a higher rate than citizens of any other developed country." Page 172
"'I am evolving from being an animal.' he said. 'But it is going very very slowly. Sometime I try to cry and laugh like other people, just to see if it feels like anything. Yet tears don't come. Laughter doesn't come.'" Page 178
"'Most survivors are 'preoccupied with shame, self-loathing, and a sense of failure.'" Page 179
"He feels a need to make sense of why he survived that camp." Page 182
Harrowing and heartbreaking Ten Laws of Camp 14, most of which end with "you will be shot immediately."
Where to go to help:
Good Friends - Buddhist aid group
http://www.nkeconwatch.com/category/organizaitons/good-friends/
http://www.dailynk.com/english/
http://nothingtoenvy.com/
Aquariums of Pyongyang - Kang Chol-hwan
http://www.amazon.com/The-Aquariums-Pyongyang-Years-Korean/dp/0465011047/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335750369&sr=1-1
The Hidden Gulag
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CCgQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.davidrhawk.com%2FHiddenGulag.pdf&ei=dvGdT8qBJ-WjiAKFj9ls&usg=AFQjCNHfU_lKgtAii48JMgtvP3OYWeiIYg
