Escape from Camp 14 Read Free

twenty-six years old – three years out of Camp 14.
    I was fifty-six years old at that memorable lunch. As a correspondent for the Washington Post in Northeast Asia, I had been searching for more than a year for a story that could explain
how North Korea used repression to keep from falling apart.
    Political implosion had become my specialty. For the Post and for the New York Times , I spent nearly three decades covering failed states in Africa, the collapse of communism in
Eastern Europe, the breakup of Yugoslavia and the slow-motion rot in Burma under the generals. From the outside looking in, North Korea seemed ripe – indeed, overripe – for the kind of
collapse I had witnessed elsewhere. In a part of the world where nearly everyone else was getting rich, its people were increasingly isolated, poor and hungry.
    Still, the Kim family dynasty kept the lid on. Totalitarian repression preserved their basket-case state.
    The problem with showing how they did it was lack of access. Elsewhere in the world, repressive states are not always successful in sealing their borders. I had been able to work openly in
Mengistu’s Ethiopia, Mobutu’s Congo and Milosevic’s Serbia, and had slipped in as a tourist to write about Burma.
    North Korea was much more careful. Foreign reporters, especially Americans, were rarely allowed inside. I visited North Korea only once, saw what my minders wanted me to see and learned little.
If journalists entered illegally, they risked months or years of imprisonment as spies. To win release, they sometimes needed the help of a former American president. 5
    Given these restrictions, most reporting about North Korea was distant and hollow. Written from Seoul or Tokyo or Beijing, stories began with an account of Pyongyang’s latest provocation,
such as sinking a ship or shooting a tourist. Then the dreary conventions of journalism kicked in: American and South Korean officials expressed outrage. Chinese officials called for restraint.
Think-tank experts opined about what it might mean. I wrote more than my share of these pieces.
    Shin, though, shattered these conventions. His life unlocked the door, allowing outsiders to see how the Kim family sustained itself with child slavery and murder. A few days after we met,
Shin’s appealing picture and appalling story ran prominently on the front page of the Washington Post .
    ‘Wow,’ wrote Donald G. Graham, chairman of the Washington Post Company, in a one-word e-mail I received the morning after the story appeared. A German filmmaker, who happened to be
visiting Washington’s Holocaust Memorial Museum on the day the story was published, decided to make a documentary about Shin’s life. The Washington Post ran an editorial saying
that the brutality Shin endured was horrifying, but just as horrifying was the world’s indifference to the existence of North Korea’s labour camps.
    ‘High school students in America debate why President Franklin D. Roosevelt didn’t bomb the rail lines to Hitler’s camps,’ the editorial concluded. ‘Their children
may ask, a generation from now, why the West stared at far clearer satellite images of Kim Jong Il’s camps, and did nothing.’
    Shin’s story seemed to get under the skin of ordinary readers. They wrote letters and sent e-mails, offering money, housing and prayers.
    My article had only skimmed the surface of Shin’s life. It struck me that a deeper account would unveil the secret machinery that enforces totalitarian rule in North Korea. It would also
show, through the details of Shin’s improbable flight, how some of that oppressive machinery is breaking down, allowing an unworldly young escapee to wander undetected across a police state
and into China. Just as importantly, no one who read a book about a boy bred by North Korea to be worked to death could ever ignore the existence of the camps.
    I asked Shin if he was interested. It took him nine months to make up his mind. During those