Escape from Camp 14 Read Free Page B

reviewed the growing body of scholarly research on and personal memoirs about the camps. In the United States, I conducted extended
interviews with Korean Americans who have become Shin’s closest friends.
    In assessing Shin’s story, one should keep in mind that many others in the camps have endured similar or worse hardships. According to An Myeong Chul, a former camp guard and driver,
‘Shin had a relatively comfortable life by the standards of other children in the camps.’
    By exploding nuclear bombs, attacking South Korea and cultivating a reputation for hair-trigger belligerence, the government of North Korea has stirred up a semi-permanent security emergency on
the Korean Peninsula.
    When North Korea deigns to enter into international diplomacy, it has always succeeded in shoving human rights off the negotiating table. Crisis management, usually focused on nuclear weapons
and missiles, has dominated American dealings with the North.
    The labour camps have been an afterthought.
    ‘Talking to them about the camps is something that has not been possible,’ David Straub, who worked in the State Department during the Clinton and Bush years as a senior official
responsible for North Korea policy, told me. ‘They go nuts when you talk about it.’
    The camps have barely pricked the world’s collective conscience. In the United States, newspaper stories notwithstanding, ignorance of their existence remains widespread. For several years
in Washington, a handful of North Korean defectors and camp survivors gathered each spring on the Mall for speeches and marches. The Washington press corps paid little attention. Part of the reason
was language. Most of the defectors spoke only Korean. As important, in a media culture that feeds on celebrity, no movie star, pop idol or Nobel Prize winner stepped forward to demand that
outsiders invest emotionally in a distant issue that lacks good video footage.
    ‘Tibetans have the Dalai Lama and Richard Gere, Burmese have Aung San Suu Kyi, Darfurians have Mia Farrow and George Clooney,’ Suzanne Scholte, a long-time activist who brought camp
survivors to Washington, told me. ‘North Koreans have no one like that.’
    Shin told me he does not deserve to speak for the tens of thousands still in the camps. He is ashamed of what he did to survive and escape. He has resisted learning English, in part because he
does not want to have to tell his story again and again in a language that might make him important. But he desperately wants the world to understand what North Korea has tried so diligently to
hide. His burden is a heavy one. No one else born and raised in the camps has escaped to explain what went on inside – what still goes on inside.

PART ONE

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    Shin and his mother lived in the best prisoner quarters Camp 14 had to offer: a ‘model village’ next to an orchard and just across from the field where his mother
was later hanged.
    Each of the forty one-storey buildings in the village housed four families. Shin and his mother had their own room, where they slept side by side on a concrete floor. The four families shared a
common kitchen, which had a single bare light bulb. Electricity ran for two hours a day, from four to five in the morning and ten to eleven at night. Windows were made of grey vinyl too opaque to
see through. Rooms were heated in the Korean way by a coal fire in the kitchen with flues running under the bedroom floor. The camp had its own coal mines and coal for heating was readily
available.
    There were no beds, chairs or tables. There was no running water. No bath or shower. Prisoners who wanted to bathe sometimes sneaked down to the river in the summer. About thirty families shared
a well for drinking water. They also shared a privy, which was divided in half for men and women. Defecating and urinating there was mandatory, as human waste was used as fertilizer on the camp
farm.
    If Shin’s mother met her daily work quota, she could bring