Escape from Camp 14

“Most North Koreans are sent to the camps without any judicial process, and many die there without learning the charges against them. They are taken from their homes, usually at night, by the Bowibu, the National Security Agency. Guilt by association is legal in North Korea. A wrongdoer is often imprisoned with his parents and children.” 

This quote summarizes the process whereby most North Koreans find themselves in labor camps. This is not applicable to Shin, who was born in Camp 14, yet what Shin has in common with many of these individuals is his ignorance about what he has done wrong. In North Korea, no trial is required before people are imprisoned: people are simply snatched from their homes by the National Security Agency and find themselves in labor camps. As this quote also affirms, they do not even have to have committed a crime: guilt by association provides sufficient legal grounds for imprisonment.  

“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.’”

Harden comments on the world’s indifference to North Korea’s labor camps at various points in this book. Whereas the horrors and injustice of the Nazi regime have been recorded for posterity, human rights issues in North Korea continue to be overlooked. Thus, it is not just what is going on in the camps that is unjust; it is also the fact that it has garnered so little international attention. Here, Harden cites an editorial in the Washington Post, which suggests that future generations will question this apathy. Specifically, they will look at the satellite images of these camps and ask why people did nothing when such clear evidence of human rights violations existed.

“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.” 

While inside the camp, Shin had no conception of emotions such as guilt and compassion; indeed, his life was simpler in this respect. In the years following his escape, however, he has been forced to deal with new, more complex emotions. He now feels guilty about what he did in order to escape, and he does not wish to make himself seem important. When he tells his story, it is because he wants to draw attention to the existence of these camps and to combat the indifference to them that has prevailed thus far. 

“A reward marriage was the only safe way around the no-sex rule. Marriage was dangled in front of prisoners as the ultimate bonus for hard work and reliable snitching. Men became eligible at twenty-five, women at twenty-three. Guards announced marriages three or four times a year, usually on propitious dates, such as New Year’s Day or Kim Jong Il’s birthday. Neither bride nor groom had much say in deciding whom they would marry. If one partner found his or her chosen mate to be unacceptably old, cruel, or ugly, guards would sometimes cancel a marriage. If they did, neither the man nor the woman would be allowed to marry again.” 

This quote explains how marriage functions within the camps. Prisoners are not free to engage in relationships with one another, nor are they free to choose a partner. Rather, they are offered the prospect of an arranged marriage in exchange for hard work. Prisoners do not have to accept this offer but, should they reject a proposed match, they will not be given another chance.

“In the years after he escaped the camp, Shin learned that many people associate warmth, security and affection with the words ‘mother’, ‘father’ and ‘brother’. That was not his experience. The guards taught him and the other children in the camp that they were prisoners because of the ‘sins’ of their parents. The children were told that while they should always be ashamed of their traitorous blood, they could go a long way towards ‘washing away’ their inherent sinfulness by working hard, obeying the guards and informing on their parents.” 

As is made clear in this quote, the concept of familial love is something that Shin only learned about after he left the camp. All he had known prior to escape was that children in the camp were prisoners because their parents had sinned, which fostered resentment towards their parents. These children were taught that they should be ashamed of their families, and that they could only overcome this taint by working hard, being obedient, and acting as an informer whenever possible. The guards therefore pitted them against their parents and instilled a negative view of the family unit, using the concept of a tainted bloodline as a form of motivation. 

“The ‘eating problem’, as it’s often called in North Korea, is not confined to labour camps. It has stunted the bodies of millions across the country. Teenage boys fleeing the North in the past decade are on average five inches shorter and weigh twenty-five pounds less than boys growing up in South Korea.

Mental retardation caused by early childhood malnutrition disqualifies about a quarter of potential military conscripts in North Korea, according to the National Intelligence Council, a research institution that is part of the US intelligence community. Its report said hunger-caused intellectual disabilities among the young were likely to cripple economic growth even if the country opened to the outside world or united with the South.” 

It is unsurprising that food is scarce in the camp given that food is in short supply in North Korea in general. In contrast to the prosperity of South Korea, North Korea suffers an “eating problem” whereby millions of children experience malnourishment. In some cases, this is severe enough to cause mental retardation that disqualifies individuals from military conscription. Researchers have speculated that such intellectual disabilities are likely to stunt any potential economic growth, meaning that North Koreans will continue to live in hardship.

“To identify and isolate his perceived political enemies, Kim Il Sung created a neofeudal, blood-based pecking order in 1957. The government classified and, to a considerable extent, segregated the entire North Korean population based on the perceived reliability of an individual’s parents and grandparents. North Korea called itself the Worker’s Paradise, but even as it professed allegiance to communist ideals of equality, it invented one of the world’s most rigidly stratified caste systems.” 

Here, we see that the emphasis on bloodlines is not restricted to North Korea’s labor camps. In fact, the country operates according to a rigid caste system that has been in place since 1957. So, while it may profess communist ideals of equality, the reality is a different matter: North Korean society is segregated on the basis of the perceived reliability of one’s blood relatives. 

“One well-travelled member of the North Korean elite told me how he earned his keep while securing the support and affections of Kim Jong Il. His name is Kim Kwang Jin and he grew up in Pyongyang as a member of the blue-blood elite. He studied British literature at Kim Il Sung University, which is reserved for children of top officials. His professional expertise, before defecting to South Korea in 2003, was managing a state-run global insurance fraud. It collected hundreds of millions of dollars from some of the world’s largest insurance companies on falsified claims for industrial accidents and natural disasters inside North Korea, and it funneled most of the money to the Dear Leader.” 

In this passage, Kim Kwang Jin attests to the extent of corruption within North Korea. The inequality between the Kim dynasty and the rest of North Korean society is explained in part by such arrangements: traders claimed money from global insurance companies for supposed natural disasters or industrial accidents, when, really, the money received went directly to the Kim dynasty. 

“‘We received a letter of thanks and it was a great celebration,’ he said, noting that Kim Jong Il arranged for him and his colleagues to receive gifts that included oranges, apples, DVD players and blankets.

Fruit, home electronics and blankets.

This meagre display of dictatorial gratitude is telling. In Pyongyang, living standards for the core class are luxurious only by the standards of a country where a third of the population is chronically hungry.” 

This quote explains that even the most prosperous region of North Korea, the city of Pyongyang, is luxurious only by North Korea’s low standards. When a trader and his colleagues received a reward from Kim Jong Il, for instance, they were jubilant to find themselves in receipt of fruit, electronics, and blankets. The “core class” of Pyongyang may not suffer from the poverty that afflicts some other North Koreans, but, on the whole, the country experiences a meager standard of living compared to both South Korea and its own ruling elite. 

“The exception, of course, is the Kim family dynasty. Satellite images of the family’s residences stand out like sable-clad thumbs in the mangy landscape of North Korea. The family maintains at least eight country houses, according to books by his former chef and a former bodyguard. Nearly all of them have cinemas, basketball courts and shooting ranges. Several have indoor swimming pools, along with entertainment centres for bowling and rollerskating. Satellite pictures show a full-size horseracing track, a private train station and a water park.” 

This quote highlights the acute inequality that exists in North Korea and that can be seen via satellite images. Whereas the vast majority country’s population lives in relative poverty, its rulers—the Kim dynasty—reside in palatial surroundings complete with a host of luxuries. The political and economic issues surrounding this inequality are expanded upon elsewhere in the book, but this snippet highlights the comfort and opulence enjoyed by North Korea’s rulers while the rest of the populace experience varying degrees of hardship and suffering. 

“It is difficult to overstate the importance of rice in North Korean culture. It signifies wealth, evokes the closeness of family and sanctifies a proper meal. Labour camp prisoners almost never eat rice and its absence is a daily reminder of the normality they can never have.

Outside the camp, too, chronic shortages have removed rice from the daily diets of many North Koreans, especially those in the hostile classes. Teenage defectors from the North, when they arrive in South Korea, have told government counsellors of a recurring dream: they are sitting at a table with their families, eating warm rice.” 

This quote underscores the symbolic significance of rice in North Korean culture, and sheds light on Shin’s strained relationship with his mother. When Shin sees his mother cooking rice for his brother, he takes it as a major affront. Not only is food scarce in the camp, but rice symbolizes wealth and family. Rice may be a dietary staple in other cultures, yet, in North Korea, it is in short supply. That people who have defected from North Korea dream of eating rice with their families makes the reader aware of the importance and connotations of rice. 

“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 had trusted no one, with the possible exception of Hong Sung Jo, and informed on everyone. In return, he expected abuse and betrayal. In the cell, Uncle slowly reconfigured those expectations. The old man said he was lonely and seemed genuinely happy to share his space and meals with someone else.” 

Shin’s time in prison may have been arduous but it also marked his first exposure to human kindness in the form of his cellmate, an older prisoner known as “Uncle.” Prior to meeting Uncle, Shin had not even trusted his family, and abuse and betrayal were simply the norm within the camp. Uncle, however, tended to Shin’s wounds and was compassionate and congenial. As Shin had lived in the camp all his life, he had never known such kindness. He therefore found it puzzling even while he was immensely grateful and the time he spent with Uncle prompted him to rethink what he had been taught up to that point.

“She scanned the crowd and found Shin. He refused to hold her gaze.

When guards pulled away the box, she jerked about desperately. As he watched his mother struggle, Shin thought she deserved to die.

Shin’s brother looked gaunt and frail as guards tied him to the wooden post. Three guards fired their rifles three times. Bullets snapped the rope that held his forehead to the pole. It was a bloody, brain-splattered mess of a killing, a spectacle that sickened and frightened Shin. But he thought his brother, too, had deserved it.” 

In this visceral scene, Shin watches as his mother and brother are executed. Shin has not spoken to his mother since he informed the night guard about their plans to escape. Though his mother tries to hold his gaze, he cannot look at her. At this point, Shin is still consumed with anger: witnessing his mother and brother being executed is certainly a horrific sight but Shin has no wish for them to be saved. He has no prior experience of familial love, and he believes that they deserve to die for having put his own life at risk. 

“As wretched as Shin’s life became after the execution of his mother and brother, suicide for him was never more than a passing thought.

There was a fundamental difference, in his view, between prisoners who arrived from the outside and those who were born in the camp: many outsiders, shattered by the contrast between a comfortable past and a punishing present, could not find or maintain the will to survive. A perverse benefit of birth in the camp was a complete absence of expectations.” 

This quote demonstrates an inherent difference between prisoners who were born in the camps and those who had lived in the outside world. For all the brutality and injustice associated with these camps, individuals who are born in this environment experience the “perverse benefit” of accepting the ethos of the camp completely; they do not experience a culture shock or sense of longing for the comfortable life that they once knew. 

“Shin’s misery never skidded into complete hopelessness. He had no hope to lose, no past to mourn, no pride to defend. He did not find it degrading to lick soup off the floor. He was not ashamed to beg a guard for forgiveness. It didn’t trouble his conscience to betray a friend for food. These were merely survival skills, not motives for suicide.” 

Here, Harden elaborates on the mindset fostered within these camps; particularly for those born within their confines. Because life in the camp was all that Shin knew, he accepted various forms of degradation as simply part of normal life in the camp. Ideas of fidelity and hope were foreign to him, and he felt no guilt for informing on other people; the only thing that mattered was survival. This does not mean that Shin was not miserable, but, unlike some other prisoners, he never felt hopeless to the point of contemplating suicide.

“Unlike any other aid recipient in the world, North Korea’s government insisted on sole authority for transporting donated food. The demand angered the United States, the country’s largest aid donor, and frustrated the monitoring techniques that the UN World Food Programme had developed around the world to track aid and make sure it reached the intended recipients. But since the need was so urgent and the death toll so high, the West swallowed its disgust and delivered more than one billion dollars’ worth of food to North Korea between 1995 and 2003.” 

In the wake of a devastating famine in the 1990s, North Korea relied on foreign aid to feed its population. Its government, however, demanded full control of the donated food as it was transported within the country. This demand was unpopular with Western donors, and, indeed, the extent to which donations reached those who really needed them is debatable. For the North Korean government to insist on this condition inevitably raises suspicions, especially given the government-sanctioned insurance fraud that was also going on in the country. Still, the situation was so dire that donors were forced to relent and contribute vast quantities of food.

“The government had little choice – after the famine, the collapse of its food-distribution system and the rise of private markets – but to offer farmers higher prices and increase incentives to grow more food. Private farming on small plots of land was legalized in 2002. This allowed more private farm-to market trade, which increased the power of traders and the autonomy of productive farmers.

Kim Jong Il, however, never warmed to market reform and his government called it ‘honey-coated poison’.” 

The Kim dynasty upheld a supposedly communist regime, yet, in the wake of famine, the government had little choice but to fund private enterprise. The famine had already led to an upsurge in private markets, as the official, nationwide food distribution system had collapsed. The government consequently provided incentives to farmers as a means of encouraging food production. Even so, Kim Jong Il was uneasy about this rise in capitalism, as it undermined the government’s stronghold over the country, its everyday functioning, and its economy. 

"While the old man in the underground prison had eaten well in North Korea, Park’s gustatory adventures were global. He described the enchantments of chicken, pork and beef in China, Hong Kong, Germany, England and the former Soviet Union. The more Shin listened to these stories, the more he wanted out of the camp. He ached for a world where an insignificant person like himself could walk into a restaurant and fill his stomach with rice and meat. He fantasized about escaping with Park because he wanted to eat like Park.

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.” 

Shin’s interest had already been piqued by Uncle’s references to food in the outside world, but Park’s culinary experience was even more wide-ranging. Food had been a constant motivating force for Shin inside the camp, and he and the other prisoners often scavenged for food and even ate rats. Park referred to various aspects of the outside world, but it was his stories about food that initiated Shin’s desire to escape. The idea of walking into a restaurant and ordering rice and meat may seem commonplace to many people, but it was a fantasy that captivated Shin and became his key source of motivation.

“Like Nazi concentration camps, labour camps in North Korea use confinement, hunger and fear to create a kind of Skinner box: a closed, closely regulated chamber in which guards assert absolute control over prisoners. Yet while Auschwitz existed for only three years, 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 each other from birth.” 

The atrocities of Nazi labor camps are well-known, with Auschwitz being a prime example. However, whereas Auschwitz existed for three years, Camp 14 has been in existence for over 50 years. The outside world may have remained largely oblivious to it, yet it has operated as a long-term Skinner box: an isolation chamber used to study and teach behavior through the use of rewards such as food and water. So, in the same manner as a rat learns to press a lever in order to get food, prisoners learn how to behave if they are to survive. Harden thus describes Camp 14 as a powerful form of mind control, where hunger and fear are used as tools to ensure compliance and to pit individuals against one another.  

“It shocked him to see North Koreans going about their daily lives without having to take orders from guards. When they had the temerity to laugh together in the streets, wear brightly coloured clothes or haggle over prices in an open-air market, he expected armed men to step in, knock heads and stop the nonsense.

The word Shin uses again and again to describe those first days is ‘shock’.

It was not meaningful to him that North Korea in the dead of winter is ugly, dirty and dark, or that it is poorer than Sudan, or that, taken as a whole, it is viewed by human rights groups as the world’s largest prison.

His context had been twenty-three years in an open-air cage run by men who hanged his mother, shot his brother, crippled his father, murdered pregnant women, beat children to death, taught him to betray his family and tortured him over a fire.” 

Shin’s main emotion during his first days of freedom was shock. North Korea may not be an affluent, comfortable place to live, but Shin had no point of comparison other than Camp14: North Korea’s relative poverty and reputation meant nothing to him. As someone who had been imprisoned for 23 years and who had experienced punishment, betrayal, and torture, Shin was struck by the freedom that most North Koreans experience in their daily lives. 

“North Korean defectors arriving in Seoul said that Chinese-made transistor radios had allowed them to listen to Chinese and South Korean stations, as well as to Radio Free Asia and Voice of America. Many told stories of how they had become addicted to Hollywood movies and South Korean soap operas.

‘We closed the drapes and turned the volume down low whenever we watched the James Bond videos,’ a forty-year-old housewife from North Korea told me in Seoul. She fled her fishing village in a boat with her husband and son. ‘Those movies were how I started to learn what is going on in the world, how people learned the government of Kim Jong Il is not really for their own good.’” 

While its government seeks to keep North Koreans oblivious to life outside the country, the border is not sufficiently rigid to keep out video-CDs smuggled from South Korea; likewise, Chinese-made transistor radios enable people to receive broadcasts that have opened their eyes to the outside world. The government’s official line is that people in South Korea are poor and unhappy, but glamorous South Korean soap operas suggest otherwise. Likewise, Western movies and television shows have opened a window on the outside world. Viewing or listening to such material is punishable serious crime, but this has not stopped people from doing so. Thanks to these texts, then, North Koreans have started to question the claims of their government.

“Nearly all defectors arrive at Hanawon showing clinical symptoms of paranoia. They whisper and get in fistfights. They are afraid to disclose their names, ages or places of birth. Their manners often offend South Koreans. They tend not to say ‘thank you’ or ‘sorry’.

Questions from South Korean bank tellers, whom they meet on field trips to open bank accounts, often terrify defectors. They doubt the motives of nearly all people in positions of authority. They feel guilty about those they left behind. They fret, sometimes to the point of panic, about their educational and financial inferiority to South Koreans. They are ashamed of the way they dress, talk and even wear their hair.” 

This quote highlights some of the difficulties that North Korean defectors experience when they arrive in South Korea. Typically, they feel alienated, guilty, and ashamed. They are aware that they do not fit in to their new surroundings; they remain paranoid and frightened by authority figures and are scared to reveal personal details. This paranoia is exacerbated by the emphasis on education, financial success, and good manners in South Korean society. Defectors therefore find themselves in what seems like another world and are liable to feel inferior and unwelcome.

“Shin exaggerated the South’s lack of concern about the North, but he had a valid point. It’s a blind spot that baffles local and international human rights groups. Overwhelming evidence of continuing atrocities inside the North’s labour camps has done little to rouse the South Korean public. As the Korean Bar Association has noted, ‘South Koreans, who publicly cherish the virtue of brotherly love, have been inexplicably stuck in a deep quagmire of indifference.’” 

This quote addresses South Korea’s response—or lack thereof—to the human rights issues occurring north of the border. As many interviewees have commented, South Koreans are typically more concerned with their own lives. There is overwhelming evidence of North Korea’s labor camps, yet South Koreans appear largely unconcerned by the issue. Despite pretenses of fraternal love, then, South Korea has been far from proactive in responding to the injustices occurring in the North.