To this day North Korea operates prison camps. Shin was born inside one of them. He lived his first 23 years behind barbed wire, without running water, heat, or adequate food. When his family considered escape, Shin turned them in, and watched them die. Shin’s story is the focus of a new book, called “Escape From Camp 14.” Seattle based author Blaine Harden met Shin while he was working for The Washington Post based in Tokyo. Harden was in Boise today to talk about his book. And he told Samantha Wright that Camp 14 has existed for more than a half century.
A. Shin is the only person born and bred in one of these camps to escape.
Q. People might get the wrong idea when we say camp. This is a “camp” that is 30 miles long and holds 15,000 prisoners and is just one of many, right?
A. Right. There’s a gulag, a Soviet-style political prison gulag and it’s existed since the end of the 1950’s. There are now six camps with between 135,000 and 200,000 people. The people in the camps are the perceived political enemies of the Kim Family dynasty, which has run the country through three generations now. To get in the camp you have to be perceived as being an enemy, it’s that simple. If I were to say that Kim Jong-un, the current leader of the country, was fat and incompetent, there’s a good chance that I would go to one of these camps, my children would go along with me and so would my parents. There’s collective punishment. And we would all go and eat the same meal every day, corn cabbage and salt, and be worked to death.
Q. Was Shin born in the camp?
A. Shin was bred in the camp, very much like a hog in a big hog confinement unit in Iowa. His parents were young adults in the camp who were selected by the guards and ordered to have sex. He’s the result of that marriage. He was raised more or less by the guards who taught him to snitch on his parents and on his friends and the more he snitched, the better he ate.
Q. Describe a day in the life of Shin.
A. His days were pretty much the same. He would get up before dawn, have breakfast, work all day until dark, and then go to meetings of self-criticism at night and then go to sleep about 11. Lack of sleep was a big problem in the camp. People didn’t eat much and they didn’t sleep much, they mostly worked. The critical element in this story happened when he was 13 years old. He heard his mother and brother talking about an escape plan. In the rules of the camp, if you talk about escape, you’ll be shot and if you hear someone else talking about escape and fail to report it, you will be shot. Shin, after he heard his mother and brother talking, he turned them in. Seven months later, he was taken to the execution grounds of the camp and forced to watch as his brother was shot and his mother was hanged. He lived with the memory of this until he escaped from the camp, ten years later.
A. So how did Shin first get the idea to escape from camp, because it’s bred into you not to escape.
Q. He had no real interest in the world outside of the barbed wire, electrified fence that surrounds the camp. But he was assigned to work with a newcomer to the camp, a man named Park. A man who had been educated in the capital, Pyongyang, who traveled outside of North Korea. Shin was supposed to snitch on this guy. Shin has been a very loyal and effective snitch growing up. So they asked him to work with Park and then tell the authorities in the camp what Park had to say about the leadership of the country. But instead of snitching, Shin listened to him and Park give Shin a primer on planet Earth. He broke the news to him that the world was round, told him about the existence of China, South Korea, the United States, telephones, that sort of thing. But what interested Shin were Park’s stories of eating. After hearing stories about how you could go to China, go into a restaurant, and fill your stomach of grilled pork or grilled beef, Shin asked Park if he wanted to try to escape. And they did. January 2, 2005, they tried to escape. Park was the first person to get to the electrified fence that surrounds the camp. He shoved his torso through the bottom strand, was electrocuted. Shin crawled over his smoldering body and got out.
Q. Then he had to escape away from the camp?
A. He didn’t know which way was north, because of course he’d never been outside the camp. But Shin is very intelligent, very shrewd, with a great sense of self-preservation. Within in 30 days, he managed to walk, ride in a truck, ride in a train to a Chinese border. He spent about a year and a half in China, and then arrived in South Korea. Two years later he was living in Southern California. Now he’s back in Seoul and he’s a human rights worker. He does webcasting with other North Korean defectors.
Q. That’s got to be quite a change from the whole world is the camp, to the whole world on the outside.
A. His cultural, intellectual, emotional dislocation, there may be nothing like it for any individual living on this planet right now. He says he’s learning how to be a human being, learning how not to be an animal, but it is going very, very slowly.
Q. What do you hope the average reader takes away from this book?
A. Understanding that the camps are still there. Their still operating, there are still guards in these camps who are quite literally breeding children to be slaves and snitches. That’s going on even as we eat our breakfast.
Blaine Harden is the author of “Escape From Camp 14.” Harden has worked for Frontline, The Washington Post, and the New York Times. He’s working on a new book about marriage in America.
Copyright 2012 Boise State Public Radio
