Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West: Blaine Harden: 9780143122913: Amazon.com: Books

Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West: Blaine Harden: 9780143122913: Amazon.com: Books








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Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West Paperback – March 26, 2013
by Blaine Harden (Author)
4.5 out of 5 stars 2,519 ratings


Editorial Reviews

Review


"Harden’s book, besides being a gripping story, unsparingly told, carries a freight of intelligence about this black hole of a country." —Bill Keller, The New York Times


“The central character in Blaine Harden's extraordinary new book Escape from Camp 14 reveals more in 200 pages about human darkness in the ghastliest corner of the world's cruelest dictatorship than a thousand textbooks ever could . . . Escape from Camp 14, the story of Shin's awakening, escape and new beginning, is a riveting, remarkable book that should be required reading in every high-school or college-civics class. Like "The Diary of Anne Frank" or Dith Pran's account of his flight from Pol Pot's genocide in Cambodia, it's impossible to read this excruciatingly personal account of systemic monstrosities without fearing you might just swallow your own heart . . . Harden's wisdom as a writer shines on every page.” —The Seattle Times

"U.S. policymakers wonder what changes may arise after the recent death of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, this gripping book should raise awareness of the brutality that underscores this strange land. Without interrupting the narrative, Harden skillfully weaves in details of North Korea's history, politics and society, providing context for Shin's plight.” —The Associated Press

“A book without parallel, Escape from Camp 14 is a riveting nightmare that bears witness to the worst inhumanity, an unbearable tragedy magnified by the fact that the horror continues at this very moment without an end in sight.” —Terry Hong, Christian Science Monitor

“A remarkable story, [Escape from Camp 14 ] is a searing account of one man’s incarceration and personal awakening in North Korea’s highest-security prison.” —The Wall Street Journal

“As an action story, the tale of Shin’s breakout and flight is pure The Great Escape, full of feats of desperate bravery and miraculous good luck. As a human story it is gut wrenching; if what he was made to endure, especially that he was forced to view his own family merely as competitors for food, was written in a movie script, you would think the writer was overreaching. But perhaps most important is the light the book shines on an under-discussed issue, an issue on which the West may one day be called into account for its inactivity.” —The Daily Beast

“A riveting new biography . . . If you want a singular perspective on what goes on inside the rogue regime, then you must read [this] story. It’s a harrowing tale of endurance and courage, at times grim but ultimately life-affirming.” —CNN

“[Shin’s] tale becomes even more gripping after his unprecedented journey . . . after he realizes that he has been raised as something less than human. He gradually, haltingly—and, so far, with mixed success—sets out to remake himself as a moral, feeling human being.” —Fred Hiatt, The Washington Post

“If you have a soul, you will be changed forever by Blaine Harden’s Escape from Camp 14 . . . Harden masterfully allows us to know Shin, not as a giant but as a man, struggling to understand what was done to him and what he was forced to do to survive. By doing so, Escape from Camp 14 stands as a searing indictment of a depraved regime and a tribute to all those who cling to their humanity in the face of evil.”—Mitchell Zuckoff, New York Times bestselling author of Lost in Shangri-La

"This is a story unlike any other . . . More so than any other book on North Korea, including my own, Escape from Camp 14 exposes the cruelty that is the underpinning of Kim Jong Il’s regime. Blaine Harden, a veteran foreign correspondent from The Washington Post, tells this story masterfully . . . The integrity of this book, shines through on every page.” —Barbara Demick, author of Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

“In Escape from Camp 14, Harden chronicles Shin’s amazing journey, from his very first memory—a public execution he witnessed as a 4-year-old—to his work with human rights advocacy groups in South Korea and the United States . . . By retelling Shin’s against-all-odds exodus, Harden casts a harsh light on a moral embarrassment that has existed 12 times longer than the Nazi concentration camps. Readers won’t be able to forget Shin’s boyish, emancipated smile—the new face of freedom trumping repression.” —Will Lizlo, Minneapolis Star-Tribune

“Blaine Harden of the Washington Post is an experienced reporter of other hellholes, such as the Congo, Serbia, and Ethiopia. These, he makes clear, are success stories compared to North Korea . . . Harden deserves a lot more than; ‘wow’ for this terrifying, grim and, at the very end, slightly hopeful story of a damaged man still alive only by chance, whose life, even in freedom, has been dreadful.” —Literary Review

“Harden tells a gripping story. Readers learn of Shin’s gradual discovery of the world at large, nonadversarial human relationships, literature, and hope—and the struggles ahead. A book that all adults should read.” —Library Journal (starred review)

“[A] chilling [and] remarkable story of deliverance from a hidden land.” —Kirkus Reviews

“With a protagonist born into a life of backbreaking labor, cutthroat rivalries, and a nearly complete absence of human affection, Harden’s book reads like a dystopian thriller. But this isn’t fiction—it’s the biography of Shin Dong-hyuk.” —Publishers Weekly


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About the Author


Blaine Harden is a reporter for PBS's FRONTLINE and a contributor to the Economist, and has served as The Washington Post's bureau chief in East Asia, Eastern Europe, and Africa. He is the author of Africa: Dispatches from a Fragile Continent and A River Lost: The Life and Death of the Columbia. He lives in Seattle, Washington.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

----------------

FOREWORD

SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA

Early in 2015, Shin Dong-hyuk changed his story. He told me by telephone that his life in the North Korean gulag differed from what he had been telling government leaders, human rights activists, and journalists like me. As his biographer, it was a stomach-wrenching revelation.

It was also news. In the nearly three years since Escape from Camp 14 was published, Shin had become the single most famous witness to North Korea’s cruelty to its own people. He posed for photographs with the American secretary of state, received human rights awards, and traveled the world to appear on television news programs like 60 Minutes. His story helped launch an unprecedented United Nations inquiry that accused North Korea’s leaders of crimes against humanity.

When I got off the phone with Shin, I contacted the Washington Post (for which I had first written about him) and released all I then knew about his revised story. Then I flew to Seoul, where Shin lives, to find out more. This foreword explains what I learned. In two weeks of conversations, Shin was less secretive and more talkative than he had ever been during long rounds of interviews with me dating back to 2008. He seemed relieved to be correcting a story he felt had become a kind of prison.

Shin told me that when he defected to South Korea in 2006, he made a panicky, shame-driven decision to conceal and reorder pivotal episodes of his life in the gulag. He hid his role in the execution of his mother and brother. He omitted a singularly painful session of torture that shattered his faith in himself. He did not mention that he lived most of his youth in a political prison that was not Camp 14. He told this version of his life to interrogators from South Korean intelligence and the U.S. Army. He then repeated the narrative for nearly nine years, rarely changing a single detail.

Shin told me he is now determined to tell the truth. Regrettably, he has told me this before. It seems prudent to expect more revisions.

Other survivors of the camps are angry at Shin, accusing him of undermining their truthfulness and weakening the international campaign to pressure North Korea to shut down the gulag.

In assessing Shin’s credibility and the changes in his story, it is important to know that he has multiple scars consistent with extreme torture.1 Trauma victims like him tend to struggle with the truth, especially in the linear narrative form that journalists, judges, and policy makers are best able to understand. The memories of trauma victims are often fragmented and out of sequence,2 and the stories they tell can be shields behind which they try to hide.

“The most genuine narratives of going through political violence are never completely coherent or finalized,” said Dr. Stevan M. Weine, a specialist on the impact of political violence and a professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has treated trauma and studied trauma victims from Bosnia, Kosovo, Central Asia, and Africa. Between conversations with Shin in Seoul, I telephoned Weine and told him about Shin’s evolving story.

“When someone goes through profound trauma and I don’t hear a disjointed story, I am suspicious,” he told me. “Shin appears to have been exposed to prolonged and repeated torture. We can expect that this would have a major impact on every aspect of who he is, on his memory, his emotional regulation, his ability to relate to others, his willingness to trust, his sense of place in the world, and the way he gives his testimony.”

In Escape from Camp 14, I wrote that there was no way to fact-check many parts of Shin’s story because North Korea is largely closed to the outside world and it denies that political labor camps exist. But other gulag survivors had told me Shin knew things only an insider could know. Human rights investigators who had talked with scores of camp survivors found his testimony credible and precise. When this book appeared, Shin had already become a key primary source for major reports on the North Korean gulag.

Still, as I emphasized in the book, I worried about his capacity for truthfulness. I wrote that he had repeatedly lied to me. Two chapters in Escape from Camp 14 present him as an unreliable narrator of his own life.

In retrospect, I should have done more to examine the psychological dimensions of his relation to truth. It would have prepared me for what Shin disclosed in 2015, more than six years after we met and started working on the manuscript.

—

The story Shin now tells is considerably more complex—and in some ways more disturbing—than the one he told upon his arrival in South Korea in 2006. In the new version, he escaped twice to China, not once. He lived in two bordering political prison camps, not just Camp 14.

In his revised story, Shin said he was born in Camp 14, a “total control zone,” but when he was six or seven the border of that camp shifted. His home village, he said, was then incorporated into Camp 18, the slightly less brutal prison next door. North Korean government records seem to support his new version but do not conclusively prove it, as I will explain below. In any case, all the available evidence suggests that he was born and raised in a political prison.

In Escape from Camp 14, Shin said that when he was a small boy in the camp, he lived among children and adults who were destined to be worked to death as slaves without any possibility of release. As such, they were not allowed to see photographs of Great Leader Kim Il Sung or Dear Leader Kim Jong Il. But when his village became part of Camp 18, Shin said his status improved marginally. The food was no better; indeed, he said there was less of it. Another Camp 18 survivor confirms this irony, saying that because Camp 14 had better farms, it always had slightly more food.

In Camp 18, Shin did see photos of the Kims. He was also issued, for the first time, the uniform of a North Korean school pupil. While public executions for attempted escape were common in Camp 18, Shin said that as he grew up, prisoners were paid with food coupons for their work and, over time, some were released and allowed to become ordinary residents of North Korea.

These revisions in his story, while significant, do not alter the evidence of torture on Shin’s body. Indeed, he now says he was tortured more extensively by prison guards than he had previously been willing to admit.

In addition to being burned over a fire and hung by shackles from his ankles, which he had earlier described, he said guards used pliers to rip out his fingernails. Scars on his hands and the partial amputation of one finger support the claim.

“Shin’s body shows more scars from torture than any camp survivor I know who has come to South Korea, and I have met almost all of them,” said Ahn Myeong Chul, a former North Korean prison guard who for seven years worked for the National Security Agency, known as the Bowibu, the feared political police force that runs the country’s most notorious prisons, including Camp 14. Ahn is now executive director of NK Watch, a human rights group in Seoul, and knows Shin well.

“The scars prove to me that Shin was tortured at a Bowibu detention center,” said Ahn, who sees Shin’s scars as signature work of his previous employer.

Shin buried his memory of fingernail torture—and kept it from the world for nearly a decade—because he said it had been unbearable, physically and psychologically.

“I couldn’t handle it,” he said. “I tried to scrunch my fingers up so they couldn’t pull out more fingernails.”

Shin said this infuriated the guards, who forcibly straightened out the middle finger on his right hand and smashed the end of it with some kind of club. The blow effectively amputated the finger up to the first knuckle. Previously, Shin had said that guards cut off that part of his finger with a knife, as punishment for dropping a sewing machine in a camp uniform factory. But he now says he made up that story because he was ashamed of how he had been “broken” by torture.

In 2010, Shin admitted to me that when he first arrived in South Korea, he concealed how his mother and brother got caught—and were later executed—for planning an escape from prison camp. They were caught, he told me, because he betrayed their plans to a guard. An extended account of that betrayal appears in Escape from Camp 14.

In our new round of interviews, Shin changed the story again, saying his role in the executions was more shameful than he could bear to admit.

“I was jealous of my brother because my mother liked him more than me,” he said. “My mother never liked me much. She beat me much more than my brother. She never paid attention to my birthday.”

Shin said that in 1996, after he snitched to a guard about the escape plans of his mother and brother, he put his thumbprint on a police statement he knew to be false. It stated that he had seen his mother and brother commit a murder. Shin said the document, which a guard asked him to sign, was important evidence for the execution. Shin was fifteen at the time, according to a North Korean government listing of his birthdate, which says he was born on November 19, 1980. (Shin now says he is not sure what year he was born but that his father told him it was 1982.)

Shin has also acknowledged that there were some fictive elements in his former narrative. He did not live in a student dormitory in Camp 14 when he was a teenager; he lived with his father in Camp 18. During his second journey to the Chinese border, he was not “shocked” to see North Koreans shopping in street markets. He had seen them shop before, during his first flight to China.

He said he altered dates and locations for major events, such as the age at which he was tortured; he was twenty-one, not fourteen. He changed the whereabouts of the execution of his mother and brother. It occurred at an execution site beside the Taedong River in Camp 18, not on the other side of that river at an execution site in Camp 14.

When Shin began telling his story to South Korean intelligence, to human rights investigators, and to the world’s press, he said he had no idea that these details would later be considered important. He did not know what fiction or nonfiction was. He had never read a book. He said he only learned the concept of nonfiction when I told him that’s what I had to write.

Shin said he had much to be ashamed of and even more to hide when powerful people in South Korea started asking him questions. So he shaped his answers to serve his needs, not those of government interrogators, or human rights organizations, or journalists like me.

As I have explained, trauma experts see nothing unusual in this. What is unusual is that his story made him an international celebrity.

—

Some key elements of Shin’s revised story have been unintentionally corroborated by North Korea itself, in press releases, statements at the United Nations, and two propaganda videos released in the fall of 2014.

That is when the government in Pyongyang, in a furious push to derail criticism of its human rights record, zeroed in on Shin, attacking him repeatedly by name and describing him as “scum” and a “parasite.”

In the process, North Korea confirmed that Shin’s mother and brother were executed in 1996 for “premeditated murder with grave consequences” and said Shin played a role in their punishment. A press release from North Korea’s U.N. mission in New York said Shin did indeed escape twice to China.3 Between escapes, the release said, Shin failed to show “true regret” and made no effort to “redeem his crime.”

North Korea and witnesses it showcased in its videos also accused Shin of being a “criminal,” a thief who fled the country after raping a thirteen-year-old girl. He categorically denies any rape but acknowledges he did steal clothes and food while traveling across North Korea during his escapes to China. North Korea has not presented evidence that Shin was arrested or tried for rape but says he fled to China after committing his crime. North Korea’s videos have explained Shin’s scars as the result of various mining accidents and a childhood mishap that spilled “hot dog food” on his lower back when he was two.

In one government-released video,4 Shin was stunned to see his father, Shin Gyung Sub, whom he had thought was dead. The father insists in the video that neither he nor his son had ever lived in a “so-called political prison camp.” But the father himself also undermines that claim. He says that Shin was a young boy in the town of Pongchang, which at the time was inside the borders of a political prison.5

North Korean records seem to support Shin’s contention that he was born in a part of Camp 14 that was incorporated into Camp 18 when he was six or seven. The shift in administrative borders occurred in 1984, according to records located by Curtis Melvin, a researcher for the U.S.-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.

Based on the limited information in these records, Melvin said Shin’s story about being born and living as a small child in Camp 14 is “plausible.” Researchers at two respected human rights groups in Seoul share this assessment.6 But records do not explicitly delineate camp borders. Instead, they show that Shin’s home area was part of Kaechon County, where Camp 14 is located, until 1984. Then it came under the jurisdiction of Pukchang County, which administered Camp 18.

Ahn, the former prison guard, said it would have taken two or three years after the official change of county borders in 1984 before the political police in Camp 14 handed over control of Shin’s home area to the less restrictive regular police who ran Camp 18. Ahn believes that during that time Shin would likely have been living in conditions very much like those described in Escape from Camp 14.

“Shin probably did grow up until he was six or seven as a very restricted prisoner,” Ahn said. He and other human rights groups say more research is necessary to determine with certainty whether Shin was indeed born in Camp 14. Yet, by his father’s videotaped admission, Shin was a child inside Camp 18 and lived just 1.3 miles from the borders of Camp 14.

After North Korea attacked Shin by name in the late fall of 2014, the security authorities in South Korea began providing him with twenty-four-hour police protection. In the past, North Korea has sent assassins to Seoul to try to kill high-visibility defectors.

—

Before Shin arrived for the first time in South Korea in 2006, he said he spent several months in Shanghai, waiting inside the South Korean consulate for clearance to travel to Seoul. He learned from consulate staff that he would have to give an account of his life to South Korea’s National Intelligence Service.

When he heard about the coming interrogation, he was frightened and said he began to formulate a sanitized version of his life story. It omitted fingernail torture and his role in the execution of his mother and brother.

“It was a way of streamlining my story; it just happened,” he told me. “In China I never wrote down anything, just worked it out in my head.”

Having composed this script, Shin stuck to it during weeks of questioning by South Korean intelligence. Matthew E. McMahon, then an interrogator with U.S. Army Intelligence, also questioned Shin and remembers that he seemed severely traumatized. But McMahon also said that the story he heard from Shin was remarkably consistent with what he would say over and over again in future press interviews.

While the stories of many trauma victims tend to change over time, Shin’s did not. He kept it straight by writing it down as soon as he could. He did so in the Seoul offices of the Database Center for North Korean Human Rights, which gave him office space, a place to live, and two years of psychotherapy.

“It was Shin’s idea to write his book, and he did it by himself. We only corrected the spelling and grammar,” said Alice Sunyoung Choi, director of international communications for the Database Center, which published the Korean-language memoir in 2007, just a year after he arrived in South Korea.

After that, Shin often instructed curious reporters to “read my book.”

His one significant change in the script was with me in 2010, when we were winding up interviews for this book. He told me that he had not been truthful about the reasons for the executions of his mother and brother.

When Shin made this admission, I asked him what else he had been lying about. He claimed then that there was nothing else. But now he says he was on the brink of spilling his long-repressed secrets.

“I was beginning to tell you the truth, but I just stopped,” he said. “It was too painful. There were parts I could not stand recalling. At that point, I made up my mind not to tell anyone the truth. I would have covered it up forever if my father hadn’t appeared in the video.”

—

When the video was posted on YouTube in October 2014, Shin struggled to suppress his alarm. For a while, he succeeded.

From my home in Seattle, I reached him and asked him to explain what was going on. Why was his father saying that he and Shin had never been in a political prison? Shin said his father was under pressure to lie (which does seems likely) and that he was worried about what North Korea would do to him next. To explain himself, Shin wrote (with my editing help) an op-ed for the Washington Post.7 In it, he asked North Korea to let him see his father, while insisting that he would not be silenced. Shin said the same thing in a meeting with the editorial board of the New York Times.8

The video, meanwhile, angered Camp 18 survivors in Seoul. They began to grumble and privately accused Shin of being a liar.

Among the survivors was Kim Hye Sook, who spent twenty-eight years in Camp 18 before being released and finding her way to South Korea in 2009. Like Shin, she has testified around the world and written a book about her life.

Kim, who is sixty-two, recognized Shin’s father in the video, as well as his uncle, who also appeared in it. She said she knew Shin’s mother, having attended years of political “reeducation” meetings with her in the camp. Kim also remembered watching the 1996 execution of Shin’s mother and brother. (She says both were shot; Shin says only his brother was shot and his mother was hanged.)

The North Korean video confirmed Kim’s long-held suspicion that Shin had grown up in Camp 18. When she and Shin had made joint appearances for human rights events, she felt Shin avoided talking to her about prison life. She found his behavior suspicious. After seeing the video, she was furious. She now says she cannot believe anything he says.

“He gave North Koreans an excuse to say we are all liars and to deny its human rights abuses,” she told me. “Now, when I come forward with my story, somebody might be suspicious of me. I have to watch my back.”

A few days after the video of his father appeared, Shin went to see Ahn, the former prison guard and human rights activist whom he had come to regard as his “big brother.” Shin admitted he had lived in Camp 18 and conceded that other parts of his story were not accurate.

According to both men, Ahn advised Shin to wait awhile before going public. He said they should remain silent until after the UN Security Council considered a General Assembly resolution that referred North Korea to the International Criminal Court on charges of crimes against humanity. The Security Council debate took place in December 2014, with no action taken.

—

As Shin now tells it, he escaped Camp 18 twice, once in the spring of 1999 and again in the late winter of 2000, crawling under the same section of electric fence both times. He barely felt any voltage in the fence the first time and none the second. By the late 1990s, parts of Camp 18 were much less restrictive than in previous decades, and some areas were poorly guarded, according to Kim Hye Sook and the testimony of others who lived in the camp.

The first escape, Shin said, was suggested by his father, who gave his eighteen-year-old son a letter and told him to go to the home of Shin’s aunt in Mundok County, a journey of about thirty miles. According to Shin, it took him two weeks to find the place, and when he arrived, camp guards were waiting for him. They brought him back to Camp 18 and sent him to a detention center near the Taedong River, where he did forced labor, including work at a nearby hydroelectric dam (as described in Escape from Camp 14). After about a year and a half, he said, he escaped again.

This time he made it to China (as North Korea acknowledges) and worked there cutting trees for four months before local police caught him. North Korea says Shin was repatriated from China and “transferred back to our law enforcement agencies” in 2002. Shin said the date was 2001.

Guards again took him back to Camp 18 and allowed him to see his father one last time. A description of this final and sullen leave-taking occurs in Escape from Camp 14, although the location and timeframe differs from the one Shin now describes. After seeing his father, Shin said, he was driven across the Taedong River to a detention and torture facility inside Camp 14.

Shin located the building for me on Google Earth. He had located the same building for a 2012 interview with 60 Minutes. It appears to be surrounded by a high wall and looks like a National Security Agency facility, according to Ahn, the former guard who said he has seen similar buildings at four political prison camps.

“The place in Camp 14 that Shin has pinned as the location of his torture is clearly a detention center,” Ahn said. “This is the most horrible place in the camp. There is usually a basement room used for torture. When a camp is closed, these are the first places guards blow up to remove evidence.”

After about a month of torture (Shin lost track of time), he spent six months in a detention center cell, where he said an elderly prisoner helped him recover. Shin said he was then released into the general camp population. For the next three years, he worked in a mine, on a farm, and then in a uniform factory. Much of this, he said, is as described in Escape from Camp 14.

Shin’s knowledge of the camp’s geography and the function of its many buildings has impressed several human rights investigators. “We can only tell you that we are certain that he had been in Camp 14 because of the things he knew about the operation of the camp and his knowledge of construction projects inside it,” said Alice Sunyoung Choi of the Database Center in Seoul. (His knowledge of Camp 18’s geography and its buildings also squares with that of longtime resident Kim Hye Sook.)

Shin maintains that his January 2005 escape from Camp 14 occurred as described in this book, noting that the extraordinary scars on his legs were caused by that camp’s high-voltage electric fence.

But some details of his escape differ from what he has said before: He was motivated to escape, he now says, because he had been informed that he was scheduled to be executed in February of that year. He also said he was not nearly as naive as he had earlier claimed to be about the world outside the camp’s fence.

There are no witnesses to confirm any of this, and some Camp 18 survivors, including Kim Hye Sook, have said Shin could not have escaped Camp 14 and made it all the way to China since no one else is known to have done it. One Camp 18 survivor (who has declined to grant interviews) has told human rights activists that the inmate Shin claims was his accomplice in escaping Camp 14 actually died elsewhere in a mine accident.

Ahn, too, has questions.

“I can understand that he might be able to get out of the camp because guards are not always alert,” he said. “But his escape would have created an alert. How could he pass the security points in North Korea? How come no one caught him in the train station?”

Shin said security forces did look for him in 2005, but he knew how to travel anonymously across North Korea because he had done it before, having used the same escape route in 2001. Until more evidence emerges, that is where his story stands, with Shin turning up in China in 2005.

—

Experts have known with certainty about the scale of suffering in the North Korean gulag since at least 2003, when eyewitness testimony was correlated with satellite pictures. Since then, as satellite imagery has been refined, there has been a flood of reports, white papers, and commission findings. Scores of camp survivors have given accounts of murder, rape, beatings, torture, slave labor, and starvation.

But for much of the past decade the general public, especially in the United States, barely noticed.

This is not an anomaly. The suffering a totalitarian state secretly inflicts on its own people has historically been difficult for nonexpert outsiders to comprehend or care about.

What can change public perception is a powerful story about one individual.

Consider Stalin’s gulag. The Western world focused its attention on labor camps in the former Soviet Union only after the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a short novel based on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s eight years in the gulag.

Spare, quick to read, and emotionally explosive, the book became the single most searing indictment of the gulag, even though it appeared in 1962, nine years after Stalin died and the camps began to close.

Shin, of course, is no Solzhenitsyn. He is not a poet, a journalist, or a historian. Raised in a dysfunctional family in a secret prison, badly educated, and tortured, he is a flawed eyewitness to the savagery of the world’s last totalitarian state. As he has often said of himself, he is an “animal” slowly learning how to be a human being.

It is not his fault he became globally famous during that learning process. I am accountable for that, along with plenty of other journalists and human rights groups. It is our business to grab the attention of a mass audience and to focus it on horror in distant places. We know how to do it: tell a human story, shattering and short.

Shin’s life is such a story. It is not fiction. It is journalism and history built around one young man’s memory, as refracted through a collapsed scheme to hide from trauma, torture, and shame. It should now be read in the light of all that Shin is willing to acknowledge and correct. As such, it reveals the depravity that North Korea continues to deny.





PREFACE

A TEACHABLE MOMENT

His first memory is an execution.

He walked with his mother to a wheat field near the Taedong River, where guards had rounded up several thousand prisoners. Excited by the crowd, the boy crawled between adult legs to the front row, where he saw guards tying a man to a wooden pole.

Shin In Geun was four years old, too young to understand the speech that came before that killing. At dozens of executions in years to come, he would listen to a supervising guard telling the crowd that the prisoner about to die had been offered “redemption” through hard labor, but had rejected the generosity of the North Korean government. To prevent the prisoner from cursing the state that was about to take his life, guards stuffed pebbles into his mouth, then covered his head with a hood.

At that first execution, Shin watched three guards take aim. Each fired three times. The reports of their rifles terrified the boy and he fell over backward. But he scrambled to his feet in time to see guards untie a slack, blood-spattered body, wrap it in a blanket, and heave it into a cart.

In Camp 14, a prison for the political enemies of North Korea, assemblies of more than two inmates were forbidden, except for executions. Everyone had to attend them. The labor camp used a public killing—and the fear it generated—as a teachable moment.

Shin’s guards in the camp were his teachers—and his breeders. They had selected his mother and father. They taught him that prisoners who break camp rules deserve death. On a hillside near his school, a slogan was posted: ALL ACCORDING TO THE RULES AND REGULATIONS. The boy memorized the camp’s ten rules, “The Ten Commandments,” as he later called them, and can still recite them by heart. The first one stated: “Anyone caught escaping will be shot immediately.”

—

Ten years after that first execution, Shin returned to the same field. Again, guards had rounded up a big crowd. Again, a wooden pole had been pounded in the ground. A makeshift gallows had also been built.

Shin arrived this time in the backseat of a car driven by a guard. He wore handcuffs and a blindfold fashioned from a rag. His father, also handcuffed and blindfolded, sat beside him in the car.

They had been released from eight months in an underground prison inside Camp 14. As a condition of their release, they had signed documents promising never to discuss what had happened to them underground.

In that prison within a prison, guards tried to torture a confession out of Shin and his father. They wanted to know about the failed escape of Shin’s mother and only brother. Guards stripped Shin, tied ropes to his ankles and wrists, and suspended him from a hook in the ceiling. They lowered him over a fire. He passed out when his flesh began to burn.

But he confessed nothing. He had nothing to confess. He had not conspired with his mother and brother to escape. He believed what guards had taught him since his birth inside the camp: He could never escape and he must inform on anyone who talks about trying. Not even in his dreams had Shin fantasized about life on the outside.

Guards never taught him what every North Korean schoolboy learns: Americans are “bastards” scheming to invade and humiliate the homeland. South Korea is the “bitch” of its American master. North Korea is a great country whose brave and brilliant leaders are the envy of the world. Indeed, he knew nothing of the existence of South Korea, China, or the United States.

Unlike his countrymen, he did not grow up with the ubiquitous photograph of his Dear Leader, as Kim Jong Il was called. Nor had he seen photographs or statues of Kim’s father, Kim Il Sung, the Great Leader who founded North Korea and who remains the country’s Eternal President, despite his death in 1994.

Although he had not been important enough for brainwashing, Shin had been schooled to inform on his family and on his classmates. He won food as a reward and joined guards in beating up children he betrayed. His classmates, in turn, tattled on him and beat him up.

—

When a guard removed his blindfold, when he saw the crowd, the wooden pole, and the gallows, Shin believed he was about to be executed.

No pebbles, though, were forced into his mouth. His handcuffs were removed. A guard led him to the front of the crowd. He and his father would be spectators.

Guards dragged a middle-aged woman to the gallows and tied a young man to the wooden pole. They were Shin’s mother and his older brother.

A guard tightened a noose around his mother’s neck. She tried to catch his eye. He looked away. After she stopped twitching at the end of the rope, Shin’s brother was shot by three guards. Each fired three times.

As he watched them die, Shin was relieved it was not him. He was angry with his mother and brother for planning an escape. Although he would not admit it to anyone for fifteen years, he knew he was responsible for their executions.





INTRODUCTION

NEVER HEARD THE WORD “LOVE”

Nine years after his mother’s hanging, Shin squirmed through an electric fence and ran off through the snow. It was January 2, 2005. 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.

Within a month, he had walked into China. Within two years, he was living in South Korea. Four years later, he was living in Southern California and was a senior ambassador at Liberty in North Korea (LiNK), an American human rights group.

In California, he rode his bike to work, followed the Cleveland Indians (because of their South Korean slugger, Shin-Soo Choo), and ate two or three times a week at In-N-Out Burger, which he viewed as the world’s finest burger.

His name is now Shin Dong-hyuk.* He changed it after arriving in South Korea, an attempt to reinvent himself as a free man. He is handsome, with quick, wary eyes. A Los Angeles dentist has done work on his teeth, which he could not brush in the camp. His overall physical health is excellent. His body, though, is a road map of the hardships of growing up in a labor camp that the North Korean government insists does not exist.

-------------


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Product details

Paperback: 256 pages
Publisher: Penguin Books; Reprint edition (March 26, 2013)
Language: English

More about the author
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Biography
Blaine Harden is an author and journalist whose most recent book is King of Spies. It's the untold story of U.S. Air Force Major Donald Nichols, an intelligence agent who operated in Korea for 11 secret years with his own army of spies, his own base, and his own murderous rules. The book sheds new light on the U.S. role in the Korean War. More importantly, it explains—at a time when North Korea is threatening the U.S. with long-range nuclear missiles—the origins of an intractable foreign policy mess.
Blaine's previous book, The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot, was chosen by Amazon as one of the best books of 2015. It won a 2016 citation from the Overseas Press Club of America for non-fiction books on international affairs. The book tells the story of how North Korea's Great Leader, Kim Il Sung, grabbed power and plunged his country into war against the United States while the youngest fighter pilot in his air force played a high-risk game of deception. After years of planning, the fighter pilot fled North Korea in a MiG-15, Russia's hottest fighter jet, and made a life in the United States.

Blaine is also the author of Escape From Camp 14, a New York Times and international bestseller that has been translated into 28 languages. It's the story of Shin Dong-hyuk, the only person born and raised in a North Korean prison camp to escape to the West. Escape from Camp 14 won the 2012 Grand Prix de la Biographie Politique, a French literary award, was a nonfiction finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and was featured on 60 Minutes.

Blaine contributes to the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, PBS Frontline and The Economist. A longtime foreign correspondent, he worked for The Washington Post in Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia, as well as in New York and Seattle. He was also a roving national reporter for The New York Times and writer for the Times Magazine.

Blaine is also the author of A River Lost. It's about well-intentioned Americans (including the author's father) who dammed and degraded the West's greatest river, the Columbia. The New York Times called it a "hard-nosed, tough-minded, clear-eyed dispatch on the sort of contentious subject that is almost always distorted by ideology or obscured by a fog of sentiment." An updated and revised edition of A River Lost was published in 2012 to coincide with a PBS American Experience program about Grand Coulee Dam and the Columbia River.

Blaine's first book, Africa: Dispatches from a Fragile Continent, was described by The Independent (London) as the "best contemporary book on Africa."

Blaine lives in Seattle with his wife Jessica and their two children, Lucinda and Arno.
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Top Reviews

Annica Anatta
5.0 out of 5 stars As a South Korean, I felt so ashamed of me after listening to the audio book.Reviewed in the United States on May 20, 2014
Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

This is my first book review. I am a voracious reader. However, I did not write a book review until I listened to the audio book. One of the reasons that I did not write a book review was because I was not a native English speaker. Writing in English was not easy to me. However, after listening to the book, I felt like I had to write anything, at least saying thanks to the author and Shin, the protagonist, who had to endure unimaginable horror and is brave enough to share his story with the world.

Before I listened to the audio book, I had a vague idea of North Korea. For example, NKorean dictator, Kim Jung Il is less human, mentally ill and very dangerous. He exploited NKoreans and let them starve to death. As the author mentioned in the book, I was one of many SKoreans who were simply ignorant and indifferent to Nkorea. I felt sorry for them but that was it. Their story was one of the typical stories of poor communist countries. Their miserable and horrible story did not affect me on personal level until I encountered the book. It was a shocking and eye opening experience to me. Its horrifying story scared me to death. I had to pause many times listening to the book because I could not stop crying, or simply bear his horrible experience any more.

After reading the book, I referred it to my family and friends hoping that more SKoreans be aware of the serious problems of NKoreans. I pray for NKoreans whose rights have been completely violated by their greedy, stupid, and less human dictators, Kim's family. I still do not know what exactly I can do to help NKoreans but I will make my efforts to let more SKoreans know the dire reality of NKoreans. I will continue to have interest in unification of two Koreas and support LiNK (Liberty in North Korean).

Again, I sincerely thank to Shin whose courage is indescribable, unimaginable, and inspirational. Thanks to him, I realize that my complaints on life is just luxurious excuses. I envy his inner strength. I pray for his inner peace and freedom. I am also grateful to the author who made Shin's story available to the world in such a powerful way.

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Gus Venegas
5.0 out of 5 stars Camp 14: From Hunger and Misery to FreedomReviewed in the United States on August 20, 2016
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

In Escape from Camp 14, Blaine Harden best seller masterfully allows us to know Shin, not as a hero but as a man, by telling us a story what was done to him by the repressive government of North Korea and what he was forced to do to survive. Shin was born in Camp 14, the son to two political prisoners, and was condemned from birth to a life of hunger and misery in forced labor. Prisoners in the camp were not taught to value things like friendship and family. Shin's higher power in the camp were food, the guards and the government teachers, from many of whom he suffered sadistic beatings and torture. He was taught to inform on family and friends- and to feel indifference and no remorse for doing so. This was evident when one of his teachers beat to death a six year old classmate.

When Shin was 13 years old, he told the night guard of his school with another boy of the escape plan by his mother and brother, as informing was something he was taught to do from an early age, and he hoped to be rewarded. However, the school night guard took full credit for discovering the plan, and rather than being rewarded, Shin was arrested and guards tortured him for four days to extract more information, believing him to be part of the plan to escape. After approximately seven months spent in a tiny concrete prison cell, Shin and his father were forced to watch the public executions of Shin's mother and brother.

At age 23, Shin decides to escape with fellow prisoner Park. Park attempted to go through thru an electric fence first, but was fatally electrocuted. Shin managed to escape using Park's body as a shield to ground the current, but still suffered severe burns and permanent scars when his legs slipped onto the lowermost wire as he crawled over Park's body. After escaping, Shin broke into a nearby farmer's barn and found an old military uniform. Wearing the uniform, he was able to pass for a North Korean soldier. He survived by scrounging and stealing food. Eventually, he reached the northern border with China and bribed destitute North Korean border guards with food and cigarettes. After spending some time working as a laborer in different parts of China, Shin was accidentally found by a journalist in a restaurant, who brought him to the South Korean embassy for asylum. Living in the US today, Shin does work as a human rights advocate.

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BK
3.0 out of 5 stars Mixed feelingsReviewed in the United States on July 23, 2019
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
I have very mixed feelings about this book. It is an account of defector Shin Dong-hyuk's 2005 escape from a horrifying prison camp in North Korea, and it certainly leaves a powerful impression on the reader. In fairness, the book itself admits to a certain degree of unverifiability as well as unreliability -- significantly, Shin told author Blaine Harden varying accounts of the execution of his mother and brother, and Harden relates these varying accounts in the book. Shin's alterations to this particular part of his story concerned me, but since Harden addressed them forthrightly in the text I still found the overall narrative compelling.

But in 2015 Shin later further revised substantial elements of his narrative, well after publication of this book. To his credit, Harden acknowledges this in a revised Foreword. Yet, apart from this Foreword, Shin's original 2012 narrative remains unchanged -- even though, based on Shin's own admissions, it is clearly not true in substantial parts. I normally read forewords before diving into the book, and in this case, I really wish that I had. Instead, I read it afterward, and came away unsure of just how much of the book was fact and how much was fiction.

As it stands, it is hard for me to recommend this book. At bottom, I think its narrative should have been rewritten to comport with Shin's 2015 admissions. But, as it is currently written, it is hard to know what is fact and what is fiction, and that is a serious problem in a work that seeks to expose the brutal, dehumanizing elements of North Korean totalitarianism. The author emphasizes that Shin's dissembling can be explained at least in part as the result of living under the pressures of a totalitarian state, and I don't doubt it. Yet, in the end, I'm left with a very unreliable narrator and, therefore, a very unreliable narrative.

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Top international reviews

Boingboing
3.0 out of 5 stars An incredible journeyReviewed in the United Kingdom on August 27, 2018
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In the introduction to 'Escape from Camp 14', the author Blaine Harden tells us that there are some serious inconsistencies in the story contained within. He says that Shin Dong-hyuk has changed the story he told when he first escaped, but explains that Shin didn't want to look so bad and didn't want people to initially know that some of the things he had done in the camp were pretty much unforgivable. Those inconsistencies are spelled out but oddly, in one case relating to an injury to Shin's hand, the original story hasn't been corrected later in the book.

I bought 'Escape from Camp 14' after several of my colleagues told me that they had read it. For each of them, I think it was the only book they'd read about North Korea. Me? I have a whole Goodreads 'shelf' for Korea because I've read so many. Camp 14 IS different from the others - it's the first time I've read of the life of somebody who really was the 'lowest of the low' in North Korea's strict and complex hierarchy - a man born to parents who were both prisoners in a work camp.

The work camp angle is the unique factor in this book. The admission of earlier lies is also something quite different but a lot of Shin's life post-NK is entirely aligned with the experience of others.

Blaine Harden's book is so much more than JUST Shin's story - and given the doubts cast on his story, it's important that it is. Harden has written a book that's as much about North Korea in general as it is about this one young man's story. And it's very well written and very readable. It is, however, a bit light on detail and work camp aside, it doesn't say too much that hasn't been said before.

Is this the best book I've read on the topic of NK defectors? No, that accolade would have to go to Barbara Demick's 'Nothing to Envy' or Kang Chol-Hwan's 'The Aquariums of Pyongyang', but it's still a very interesting book.
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Alex
4.0 out of 5 stars A Very Important BookReviewed in the United Kingdom on August 12, 2018
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It is curious how Shin has altered his story. Apparently he was not only in Camp 14, but Camp 18 too, and he had successfully escaped the latter camp twice before being sent back to Camp 14. He also falsely implicated his mother and brother not only for planning to escape, but for murder. He was also tortured for attempting to escape Camp 18, not for dobbing in his mother and brother. He was also 20 years old at the time, not 13. He kept all this back because of his intense guilt.
This does somewhat weaken Shin's case, since the book details a partially fabricated version of events, and the journalist has not altered the original text too drastically out of expediency, more than anything (Shin has changed his story twice since the original edition appeared). But, the bare facts of Shin's life conveyed in this book are sadly true: he was born in Camp 14, was a slave worker, was semi-starved for many years, witnessed terribly cruelty, and in essence, is the victim of a terrible human experiment enacted by the North Korean government. That is, the breeding of slave workers within the camps, workers who know nothing of the world or of society, the idea being that, ignorant of normal life, they would be content to toil until death. But the North Korean government failed, and Shin is now (relatively) free, if very damaged. This is great victory of the human spirit which is celebrated in this book.
In terms of style, Harden is an okay writer, inasmuch as he is a journalist. He is certainly no Christopher Hitchens, and I think Barbara Demick is a better writer (see 'Nothing to Envy'). It is a quick though absorbing read, however.
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Alexa
3.0 out of 5 stars Important story, bad writingReviewed in the United Kingdom on June 24, 2015
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I expected to really feel connected to this book, I wanted to so badly to feel connected to it but I just couldn't. I have read a number books similar to this one; stories of people escaping bad regimes and I have to say this is the first one I haven't managed to finish.

Blaine Harden's writing is like a secondary school essay. There is no passion, no interest in the writing. It's cold and just states the facts without adding anything to the story being told. Huge chunks of time are skipped over, big events take place in the course of a few paragraphs or pages. The writing is just so detached that I felt it really hard to connect with Shin. Half the book is actually not about his story at all but is about the state of North Korea, their politics, economy etc (which also explains the pages and pages of references at the back). I just felt it was so hard to really feel what Shin was going through. By the time I reach the part where he escaped (about half way through), I just couldn't finish it, it was too dry (and saying that makes me feel awful).

I also found out after I finished reading this book, that a number of aspects of Shin's story as told in this book are fictitious Which makes the book quite unreliable as an accurate representation of what his life and escape were like.

I think Shin's story is so important, and it really needs to be told. But unfortunately I don't think Harden should have been the one to tell it. I would, instead, recommend reading other books about this regime - Nothing to Envy, Without You There Is No Us or The Aquariums of Pyongjang. These have the same important message but are so much more readable.
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4 people found this helpful

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Cool Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars Harrowing but excellentReviewed in the United Kingdom on January 14, 2016
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Shocking, brutal, and immensely readable. I devoured this book because it continued to appall me with its detailed descriptions of camp life and the difficulties of post-camp assimilation. Blaine Harden's revisions show that Shin's life is somewhat fiction. Aspects of his story, Shin confesses, are fabrications, embellishments or simply understated, but this perfectly amplifies the struggle of coming to terms with post camp life. What I felt most keenly coming out of this book was a sense of dissatisfaction - not with the book itself, but with the state of Shin's life as it presently stands. He has escaped and found a new home in South Korea (after a stint in America), but still seems ill at ease, uncomfortable and unsafe. He bounces from job to job, place to place, looking for an identity. A truly tragic existence, yes, but Shin has become a beacon of hope for North Korean refugees even if he will never feel satisfied with his own life. Five stars without a doubt.

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exiles
5.0 out of 5 stars Camp 14 a mesmorising true storyReviewed in the United Kingdom on November 20, 2015
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Everyone who is interested in one of the world's worst and most enduring human rights abuses should read this book. Camp 14, North korea's diabolically cruel and inhumane labour camp can be seen on Google Earth from our living rooms...but we sit in silence and move on to more comfortable dinner table conversation. Read this book and you will never be the same again. The unbelievable story is nevertheless tragically true and one that endures for countless thousands of innocent prisoners in that forgotten forest even today. It tells of a child who is born into the gulag, who grows up so deprived and intellectually manipulated that he betrays his mother and brother and smiles as they are executed. The story goes on to tell of his escape with the help of a new prisoner whose tales of food in the outside world give him the courage and determination to leave the bizarre security of the camp and strike out for the unknown. The story is memorising and I was left over and over again open mouthed that this could have happened so recently and indeed still happens every day in the parallel universe that is 21st century North Korea.


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Shin Dong-hyuk
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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For other people named Shin Dong-hyuk, see Shin Dong-hyuk (disambiguation).
This is a Korean name; the family name is Shin.

Shin Dong-hyuk

Shin Dong-hyuk in 2014
Born
Shin In Geun
19 November 1982 (age 37) or 19 November 1980 (age 39)

Kwalliso No. 14, North Korea, Kaechon, South Pyongan Province or Soksan-ri, Pukchang, South Pyongan Province[1]
Occupation Human rights campaigner,
Witness of Human rights in North Korea

Shin Dong-hyuk
Chosŏn'gŭl
신동혁
Hancha
申東赫
Revised Romanization Sin Dong-hyeok
McCune–Reischauer Sin Tonghyŏk


Shin Dong-hyuk (born Shin In Geun, 19 November 1982 or 1980[2]) is a North Korean-born human rights activist. He is reputed to be the only known prisoner to have successfully escaped from a "total-control zone" grade internment camp in North Korea. He was the subject of a biography, Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey From North Korea to Freedom in the West, by former Washington Post journalist Blaine Harden.

Shin has given talks to audiences around the world about his life in Camp 14 and about the totalitarian North Korean regime to raise awareness of the situation in North Korean internment and concentration camps and North Korea. Shin has been described as the world's "single strongest voice" on the atrocities inside North Korean camps by a member of the United Nations' first commission of inquiry into human rights abuses of North Korea.

In January 2015, he recanted aspects of his story, but a majority of experts continued to support his credibility as a victim of North Korean human rights abuses.[3][4]


Contents
1Biography
1.1Early life
1.2Mother and brother plan to escape
1.3Escape with Park
2Revision in 2015
3Post-North Korea life
4North Korean response
5Books and films
6Awards and honours
7See also
8References
9Further reading
10External links
Biography[edit]

The following is Shin's biography as told by him prior to 2015 which he later partially recanted.
Early life[edit]

Shin Dong-hyuk was born Shin In Geun[5] at the Kaechon internment camp, commonly known as Camp 14. He was born to two prisoners who were allowed to marry as a reward for good work, although "neither bride nor groom had much say in deciding whom they would marry."[6][7] Shin's father, Shin Gyung Sub, told Shin that the guards gave him his mother, Jang Hye-gyung, as payment for his skill in operating a metal lathe in the camp's machine shop. Shin lived with his mother until he was 12. He rarely saw his father who lived elsewhere in the camp and was allowed to visit a few times a year. According to Shin, he saw his mother as a competitor for their insufficient food rations,[7] and consequently had no bonds of affection with his parents or his brother, Shin He Geun.[8][9] The North Korean government officials and camp guards told him he was imprisoned because his parents had committed crimes against the state, and that he had to work hard and always obey the guards; otherwise he would be punished or executed.[10]

Shin went to primary and secondary school while in the camp. The secondary school was "little more than slave quarters from which he was sent out as a rock picker, weed puller and dam laborer." At one point, a young girl was beaten to death by the teacher for hoarding a few kernels of corn. His education did not include propaganda or even basic information about North Korea. The personality cult around Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il was also absent; for example there were no portraits of the Kim leaders on display.[11] The camp was near a hydroelectric dam and mines in which the prisoners were forced to labour. In one of Shin's prison cells, where he was held during an interrogation, he said he had electricity and running water. Shin's mother lived in a house with multiple rooms in a "model village" in the camp, given to women who had children.[12]

Shin experienced considerable violence in the camp,[13] and witnessed dozens of executions every year.[10] Part of Shin's right middle finger was cut off by his supervisor as punishment for accidentally breaking a sewing machine.[14] He witnessed adult prisoners and children beaten every day,[15][16] and many prisoners dying of starvation, illness, torture and work accidents.[10] He learned to survive by any means, including eating rats, frogs, and insects, and reporting fellow inmates for rewards.
Mother and brother plan to escape[edit]

When Shin was 13 years old, he overheard his mother and brother planning an escape attempt. Shin had just finished eating watery corn porridge, and was trying to sleep until he overheard that He Geun, his brother, had run from the cement factory. Shin's mother Jang was preparing rice, a symbol of wealth in North Korea, for the escape from Camp 14. Shin was jealous his brother was getting rice. Shin's teacher was already in the gated Bowiwon village, so Shin told the night guard of his school with another boy, as informing was something he was taught to do from an early age, and he hoped to be rewarded.[7][17] However, the school night guard took full credit for discovering the plan, and rather than being rewarded, Shin was arrested and guards tortured him for four days to extract more information, believing him to be part of the plan to escape.[7][18] According to Shin, the guards lit a charcoal fire under his back and forced a hook into his skin so that he could not struggle which caused many large scars still visible on his body.[19][20] On 29 November 1996, after approximately seven months spent in a tiny concrete prison cell, he was released and joined by his father, who had also been imprisoned. They were driven back to the main camp wearing blindfolds and their hands tied behind their backs. Camp officials then forced Shin and his father to watch the public executions of Shin's mother and brother; he then understood he had been responsible for the executions.[7][21][22]

Shin stated that at the time of the executions of his brother and mother, in his teenaged mind he felt they "deserved" their fates for both breaking prison rules and, conversely, not including him in the escape plan.[7][23] Shin has since expressed remorse over his actions, saying in an interview with Anderson Cooper for the CBS television show 60 Minutes, "My mother and brother, if I could meet them through a time machine, I would like to go back and apologize".[24]

In interviews to South Korea's National Intelligence Service and others, and in his Korean language memoir, Shin had said that he had no prior knowledge of the escape. It was only when talking to Harden that he revised his story and said that he had informed on his mother and brother.[25][26]
Escape with Park[edit]

While working at a textile factory, Shin became friends with a 40-year-old political prisoner from Pyongyang (surnamed Park), who was educated and had traveled outside North Korea. Park had been to East Germany and China. Park said that he shook Kim Jong Il's hand. Park told him about the outside world, such as stories about food that Shin had not experienced before.[27] According to Shin, nearly every meal he had eaten up to that point had been a soupy gruel of cabbage, corn, and salt, with occasional wild-caught rats and insects. He was excited by the idea of being able to eat as much food as he wanted to, which Shin considered to be the essence of freedom. "I still think of freedom as roasted chicken," he later acknowledged.[28]

Shin decided to attempt to escape with Park.[29] They formed a plan in which Shin would provide local information about the camp, while Park would use his knowledge once outside the camp to escape the country. On 2 January 2005, the pair was assigned to a work detail near the camp's electric fence on the top of a 1,200-foot (370 m) mountain ridge to collect firewood. Noting the long interval between the guards' patrols, the two waited until the guards were out of sight, then made their attempt to escape.[10][30] Park attempted to go through first, but was fatally electrocuted climbing the high voltage fence. Shin managed to pass over the wire using Park's body as a shield to ground the current, but still suffered severe burns and permanent scars when his legs slipped onto the lowermost wire as he crawled over Park's body.[7][31]

After escaping, Shin broke into a nearby farmer's barn and found an old military uniform.[32] Wearing the uniform, he was able to masquerade as a North Korean soldier at times. He survived by scrounging and stealing food.[10] Shin was unfamiliar with money, but within two days of his escape, he had sold a 10 lb (4.5 kg) bag of rice stolen from a house and used the money to buy cookies and cigarettes. Eventually, he reached the northern border with China along the Tumen River and bribed destitute North Korean border guards with food and cigarettes.[33]
Revision in 2015[edit]

In January 2015, Shin contacted Blaine Harden and recanted parts of his story.[3][34] Harden outlined the changes to Shin's account in a new foreword to his book, Escape from Camp 14, but did not revise every detail. He said a complete revision of the book would have taken months and he wanted to publish the new version as soon as possible.[35]

Shin told Harden that he had changed some dates and locations and incorporated some "fictive elements" into the story. Shin said that he did not spend his entire North Korean life at Camp 14. He said that he was born there, but when he was young, his family was transferred to the less severe Camp 18, and spent several years there. He said that not only did he inform on the escape plan of his mother and brother, but also falsely implicated them in murder. He said that he twice escaped from Camp 18. The first time, in 1999, he was caught within days. The second time, in 2001, he said he crossed into China, but was caught after four months by Chinese police and sent back to North Korea. He said that he was tortured in Camp 14 in 2002, when he was 20 years old (not 13, as previously stated), as punishment for his escape. He said he was repeatedly burned and tortured in an underground prison for six months. As a result of education in Camp 18, and his previous escapes, he said he wasn't as naive about the outside world when he made his final escape from Camp 14 as he had previously described.[2][4]

In Escape from Camp 14 Blaine Harden commented that, "Shin was the only available source of information about his early life."[36] In his new foreword for the book in 2015, he described Shin as an "unreliable narrator" and commented that, "It seems prudent to expect new revisions",[2] but also clarifying "I don’t know if that's true (that the story will change)".[35] Harden theorized that "Shin appears to have been exposed to prolonged and repeated torture. We can expect that this would have a major impact on every aspect of who he is, on his memory, his emotional regulation, his ability to relate to others, his willingness to trust, his sense of place in the world, and the way he gives his testimony."[2]

A Russian-born Korean specialist Andrei Lankov commented that "some suspicions had been confirmed when Shin suddenly admitted what many had hitherto suspected", described Harden's book as unreliable, and noted that defectors faced considerable psychological pressure to embroider their stories.[37][38] Some defectors said his testimony is "completely lies".[39] A former member of South Korea's National Intelligence Service said Shin had never lived in a "prison camp".[40] The writer Simon Winchester commented that the "authority" of the UN Commission of Inquiry report was "somewhat challenged" by this revelation.[41]

Shin explained he did not tell the full story because he wished to hide "that my mother and brother were executed because of my report," saying "the most important reason why I could not reveal all of the truth was because of my family." He went on to say "All I did until last September was discuss the camps as they were, but once the video was released [of his father], the nastiness of North Korea infuriated me. Then I realized I should not hold anything back."[4]
Post-North Korea life[edit]

US Secretary of State John Kerry listens to Shin Dong-hyuk speak about his experiences in North Korea.

After spending some time working as a laborer in different parts of China, Shin was accidentally discovered by a journalist in a restaurant in Shanghai, and the reporter recognized the importance of his story. The journalist brought Shin to the South Korean embassy for asylum,[42] and from there he traveled to South Korea, where he underwent extensive questioning from authorities to determine if he was a North Korean assassin or spy. Afterwards, his story was broadcast by the press and he published a Korean language memoir.[43]

Shin later moved to southern California, changing his name from Shin In Geun to Shin Dong-hyuk in "an attempt to reinvent himself as a free man,"[44] and worked for Liberty in North Korea (LiNK), a non-profit organization that raises awareness of human rights issues in North Korea and provides aid to North Korean refugees.[10] Shin moved back to South Korea to campaign for the eradication of the North Korean prison camps.[45]

In August 2013, Shin gave several hours of testimony to the United Nations' first commission of inquiry into human rights abuses of North Korea.[28][46] A member of the UN commission described Shin as the world's "single strongest voice" on the atrocities inside North Korean camps.[28]

Shin described some aspects of his personal life in South Korea in a Financial Times interview on popular culture saying that "I don't really know anything about music. I can't sing and I don't feel any emotion from it. But I do watch lots of films and the one that moves me the most is Schindler's List".[28] On food he says "I know everything is delicious. I look at the colours and the way the food is presented on the plate but it's very difficult to choose. When I first came to South Korea, I was so greedy that I used to order too much food. Nowadays I try to order only as much as I can handle." Although Shin lives in South Korea, he was informally adopted by an American couple in Ohio during his time in the United States.[28] He says he maintains the relationship, "I have a good relationship with my US foster parents. I contact them often. Whenever I have a holiday, I visit them. I think of them as good parents and I try to be a good son."[28]

In December 2013, Shin wrote an open letter in the Washington Post to American basketball star Dennis Rodman who visited North Korea a number of times as a self-avowed "friend for life"[47] of Kim Jong-un.[48]

On June 30, 2017 Shin Dong-hyuk became a father. His wife Leeann gave birth to Lucas Yohan Shin.[49]
North Korean response[edit]

In 2012, when the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention asked the North Korean government about the status of Shin Dong-hyuk's father, they responded that there was no such person.[50] Then in 2014, after identifying Shin Dong-hyuk as Shin In Geun, the North Korean government produced a video[51] which attempted to discredit Shin through interviews with his father and other supposed witnesses. His father denied Shin had grown up in a prison camp. According to the video, Shin had worked in a mine and fled North Korea after being accused of raping a 13-year-old girl. It also said that Shin's mother and brother were guilty of murder. The video claimed he was now spreading "preposterous false information" about human rights. Shin confirmed the man was his father. He said that the rape allegation was a fabrication that he had heard before. He later confirmed that his mother and brother were convicted of murder, but stated they were innocent.[2][52] Shin said that he believed the North Korean government was sending him a message to be quiet about human rights abuses or his father would be killed, in effect holding his father hostage.[52] The video prompted Shin to recant parts of his story.[2][4] In 2015, North Korea produced another video about Shin Dong Hyuk.[53]

On September 24, 2014, the DPRK Permanent Representative Department to the United Nations issued a communique refuting the DPRK human rights report, including the "full text of the Shin Dong-hyuk information (신동혁 자료전문)." Next to the information also given in the videos, it included additional information on Shin's birth place and his father: Shin was allegedly born in Soksan-ri, Pukchang, South Pyongan Province (평안남도 북창군 석산리)and later moved into Pongchang-ri, Pukchang, South Pyongan Province (평안남도 북창군 봉창리). He had committed an illegal border crossing to China and had been repatriated in 2002. Shin's father was born in 1944 in Ryongbuk-ri, Mundok, South Pyongan Province, not 1946. It was said that his father have married Shin's mother in 1972 and sent to a prison in 1975 for theft of state property (국가재산략취행위죄).[54]
Books and films[edit]

In 2012, journalist Blaine Harden published Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey From North Korea to Freedom in the West, based on his interviews with Shin. Harden gave a one-hour interview about the book on the C-SPAN television program Q&A.[7]

Executive Director of the US Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, Greg Scarlatoiu, said the book played "an important role" in raising wider public awareness of the North Korean camps.[55] Dalhousie University issued a statement averring that Shin's story, as told through the book, "has shifted the global discourse about North Korea, shining a light on the human rights abuses so prevalent within the regime."[56]

A German documentary, Camp 14: Total Control Zone, directed by Marc Wiese, was released in 2012.[57][58] It includes interviews with Shin Dong-hyuk and two former North Korean officers: the first, Kwon Hyuk, was a guard in Camp 22 and brought out amateur film footage (the only known footage of Camp 22), and the second, Oh Yang-nam, was a secret policeman who arrested people who were sent to camps. Supplementing the film are animated sequences of the camp created by Ali Soozandeh.[58]

On 2 December 2012, Shin was featured on 60 Minutes during which he recounted to Anderson Cooper his story of his life in Camp 14 and escape. Shin said "when I see videos of the Holocaust it moves me to tears. I think I am still evolving—from an animal to a human."[24]
Awards and honours[edit]

In June 2013, Shin received the Moral Courage Award given by UN Watch, a Geneva-based NGO (non-governmental organization).[59][60]

In May 2014, Shin was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Dalhousie University (Nova Scotia, Canada).[56] Students at the university "held a peace march and launched a social media campaign to raise awareness of human rights violations in North Korea. They then fundraised to bring Mr. Shin to Halifax, where his speech to an over-capacity crowd drew international attention."[56]
See also[edit]

biography portal
Human rights in North Korea
References[edit]

^ 미국 및 일부나라,북 인권문제 음모공작 폭로 (in Korean). 민족통신. 14 September 2014.
^ Jump up to:a b c d e f Harden, Blaine (2015). "A new Foreword to Escape from Camp 14". blaineharden.com.
^ Jump up to:a b Fifield, Anna (17 January 2015). "Prominent N. Korean defector Shin Dong-hyuk admits parts of story are inaccurate". Washington Post. Retrieved 19 January 2015.
^ Jump up to:a b c d Mina Son and Sung-yoon Won (19 March 2015). "Shin Dong-Hyuk, Survivor Of North Korean Labor Camps, Speaks Out After Controversy". Huffington Post.
^ Harden 2012, p. xiii.
^ Harden 2012, p. 17.
^ Jump up to:a b c d e f g h Blaine Harden discusses his historical narrative, Escape From Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West, Q&A with Blaine Harden, C-SPAN video library, 11 April 2012.
^ Harden 2012, pp. 49-51.
^ "The Hidden Gulag – Exposing Crimes against Humanity in North Korea's Vast Prison System" (PDF). The Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. pp. 48–51. Retrieved 20 September 2012.
^ Jump up to:a b c d e f Harden, Blaine (16 March 2012). "How one man escaped from a North Korean prison camp". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 18 March 2012. Retrieved 19 May 2014.
^ Harden 2012, p. 27.
^ Harden 2012, pp. 17-18.
^ NKDB 2011, p. 261.
^ NKDB 2011, p. 289.
^ NKDB 2011, p. 422.
^ NKDB 2011, p. 425.
^ Harden 2012, pp. 51-52.
^ Harden 2012, pp. 54-59.
^ Joohee Cho (30 October 2007). "Born and Raised in a North Korean Prison Camps". ABC News. Retrieved 26 March 2012.
^ "Medical Report and History of Shin Dong-hyuk". Life Funds for North Korean Refugees. 9 July 2007. Retrieved 26 March 2012.
^ Choe Sang-Hun (9 July 2007). "Born and raised in a North Korean gulag". The New York Times. Retrieved 29 March 2012.
^ Blaine Harden (11 December 2008). "Escapee Tells of Horrors in North Korean Prison Camp". Washington Post. Retrieved 19 May 2014.
^ Harden 2012, p. 66.
^ Jump up to:a b Staff (2 December 2012). "Becoming human: Shin's new life". CBS News. Retrieved 2 December 2012.
^ Harden 2012, p. 47.
^ Janet Maslin (12 April 2012). "Review of Escape from Camp 14". The New York Times. Retrieved 19 May 2014.
^ Harden 2012, pp. 97-99.
^ Jump up to:a b c d e f David Pilling (30 August 2013). "Lunch with the FT: Shin Dong-hyuk". Financial Times. Retrieved 2 September 2013.
^ Harden 2012, p. 104.
^ Yang Jung A (11 May 2007). "Escape from 'Total Control Zone' - North Korea's Papillon". The Daily NK. Retrieved 19 May 2014.
^ Harden 2012, pp. 115-116.
^ Harden 2012, p. 118.
^ Harden 2012, pp. 139-140.
^ Choe Sang-Hun (January 18, 2015). "Prominent North Korean Defector Recants Parts of His Story of Captivity". New York Times. Retrieved January 19, 2015.
^ Jump up to:a b John Power (March 18, 2015). "Author of book on North Korea's founding addresses Shin controversy". NK News.
^ Harden 2012, p. 46.
^ Andrei Lankov (3 February 2015). "After the Shin Dong-hyuk affair: Separating fact, fiction". NK News.
^ See also Abt, Felix (2014). A Capitalist in North Korea: My Seven Years in the Hermit Kingdom. Tuttle Publishing. p. 118. ISBN 9780804844390.
^ “그는 처음부터 18호 수용소에서 살았다” (in Korean). 한겨레. 1 April 2016.
^ <단독> 북한이 노리는 신동혁 미스터리 추적 (in Korean). 일요시사. 17 March 2016.
^ Winchester, Simon (2015). Pacific: The Ocean of the Future. William Collins. p. 181.
^ Harden 2012, pp. 157-158.
^ "Don't Insult the Victims of North Korea". The Chosun Ilbo. 25 October 2007. Retrieved 4 November 2013.
^ Harden 2012, p. 1.
^ Hinson, Tamara (30 April 2012). "I thought the outside world was paradise, says the only North Korean to escape from prison camp". thisislondon.co.uk. London, UK. Retrieved 19 May 2014.
^ Park Ju-min (20 August 2013). "Horror of North Korean prison camps exposed at UN panel hearing". Reuters. Retrieved 2 September 2013.
^ Eric Talmadge (7 January 2014). "Ex-NBA player says NKorea game dwarfed by politics". Associated Press. Retrieved 18 May 2014.
^ Shin Dong-hyuk (17 December 2013). "How Dennis Rodman can help the North Korean people". Washington Post. Retrieved 4 January 2014.
^ Harden, Blaine (2017-06-30). "Joyous news for readers of Escape from Camp 14: Shin Dong-hyuk is a father. His wife Leeann gave birth to Lucas Yohan Shin. All doing well.pic.twitter.com/RMhQr2hohR". @blaineharden. Retrieved 2017-08-25.
^ Kwon Eun Kyoung (17 November 2014). "COI Opens New Horizons for North Korean Human Rights Movement". The Daily NK. Retrieved 17 November 2014.
^ "Lie and Truth". YouTube.
^ Jump up to:a b James Pearson and Sohee Kim (28 October 2014). "Prominent defector says North Korea has taken his father hostage". Reuters. Retrieved 1 November 2014.
^ "We reveal, once again, the true identity of Sin Tong Hyok".
^ 미국 및 일부나라,북 인권문제 음모공작 폭로 (in Korean). 민족통신. 14 September 2014.
^ Esther Felden (18 June 2013). "Tortured, beaten, starved: life in a North Korean gulag". DW.de. Retrieved 21 June 2013.
^ Jump up to:a b c "Shin Dong-hyuk". Dalhousie University. Retrieved 15 April 2014.
^ "Camp 14-Total Control Zone". Retrieved 18 October 2012.
^ Jump up to:a b Jay Weissberg (14 August 2012). "Camp 14-Total Control Zone". Variety. Retrieved 18 October 2012.
^ "Top Russian & North Korean Dissidents to Appear at UN Rights Council, Win Awards". UN Watch. 4 June 2013. Retrieved 21 June 2013.
^ Stephanie Nebehay (5 June 2013). "North Korean defector's "impossible" dream of closing prison camps". Reuters. Retrieved 21 June 2013.
Further reading[edit]
Harden, Blaine (2012). Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West. Viking. ISBN 978-0-670-02332-5.
Political Prison Camps in North Korea Today. Database Center for North Korean Human Rights (NKDB). 2011. ISBN 978-89-93739-16-9.
External links[edit]
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Shin Dong-hyuk.

"I Escaped a North Korean Prison Camp". ReasonTV. – Shin Dong-hyuk discusses his escape from North Korea.
"Born and raised in a concentration camp". Google Tech Talks. – Shin Dong-hyuk talks about his experience in Kaechon internment camp
"The Hidden Gulag" (PDF). Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. – Overview of North Korean prison camps with testimonies and satellite photographs
"Mobilizing Human Rights Infrastructure in 24 Languages". Sino-NK. - Interview with Blaine Harden
Shin Dong-hyuk Freedom Collection interview
Fifield, Anna (15 February 2015). "Trauma, shame made North Korean defector alter story, author says". The Washington Post.





신동혁 (1982년)
위키백과, 우리 모두의 백과사전.

둘러보기로 가기검색하러 가기


이 글의 정확성과 사실 여부에 대해 논란이 있습니다. 내용에 대한 의견이 있으시다면 토론 문서에서 나누어 주세요. (2015년 2월 7일)


신동혁
申東赫


작가 정보
본명 신인근(개명 前 이름)
출생 1982년 11월 19일 (37세)
조선민주주의인민공화국 평안남도 북창 석산리
직업 인권 운동가, 자서전 작가
언어 한국어
국적 대한민국
활동기간 2006년 ~ 현재
장르 저술

주요 작품

영향


신동혁 (申東赫, 1982년 ~ )[1]은 개천 정치범수용소를 탈출한 북한이탈주민 출신의 북한인권 운동가이다. 본명은 신인근이었으나, 탈북 후에는 신동혁으로 개명하였다. 신동혁은 18호 관리소에서의 생활과 탈출 경험을 외부 세계에 증언하였고, 이는 북한 정치범 수용소의 실상을 알리는 계기가 되었다.[2] 그는 수용소에서 태어나 삼엄한 경비를 뚫고 탈출에 성공한 유일한 탈북자로서[1], 2012년에는 그의 경험을 토대로한 영문판 수기가 출판되었으나, 일부 증언과 진술이 사실과 다른 것으로 밝혀졌다.


목차
1생애
1.1탈출
214호 수용소로부터의 탈출
3증언 오류 시인
4북한 측의 반박
5같이 보기
6각주
7자서전
8외부 링크
생애[편집]

본래는 14호 수용소에서 출생한 것으로 알려졌으며, 어머니와 형이 '탈출 모의'로 처형된 것으로 알려졌으나, 어머니와 형은 '살인'혐의로 처형되었음이 밝혀졌다.[3]
탈출[편집]

수용소내의 공장에서 일하는 동안 신동혁은 평양에서 14호 관리소로 끌려오게된 40대의 박씨 성을 가진 수감자를 알게되고, 그와 친해진다. 박씨는 신동혁에게 관리소 밖의 세상에 대한 이야기를 해주었고, 신동혁은 특히 그가 경험에 보지 못한 닭고기, 돼지고기, 소고기로 만든 음식 이야기에 푹 빠져들었다. 수용소 내의 음식은 옥수수, 배추, 소금으로 만든 죽과 때때로 잡히는 들쥐와 곤충등이 전부였다. 원하는 음식을 마음껏 먹을수 있다는 기대에 신동혁은 박씨와 수용소를 탈출하기로 결심한다. 이들의 당초 계획은 신동혁이 수용소를 빠져나갈 길을 안내하고, 북한을 벗어나게 되면 박씨가 안내를 하는 것이었다. 2005년 1월 2일, 신동혁과 박씨는 수용소 철책 부근의 작업에 함께 투입되었다. 간수들의 순찰간격이 길다는 것을 눈치챈 둘은 간수들이 멀어지기를 기다렸다가 탈출을 감행했다.[1][4] 박씨가 먼저 철책 밑을 통과하려고 시도했지만, 고압 전류가 흐르는 철책에 몸이 닿아 그자리에서 즉사한다. 신동혁은 박씨의 시신을 방패로 삼아 철조망을 통과할 수는 있었지만, 다리가 걸리는 바람에 심한 화상을 입게 된다.

수용소를 탈출한 신동혁은 인근 농가로 들어가 낡은 군복으로 갈아입는다. 군복은 신동혁의 신분을 군인으로 위장할 수 있게 해주었고, 그는 필요한 식량을 훔치면서 북쪽의 국경지대로 다가갔다.[1] 수용소에서 태어나고 자란 신동혁은 금액에 대한 개념이 없었지만, 탈출 후, 민가에서 훔친 쌀 한가마니를 팔아 돈을 마련하고 이것으로 간식과 담배를 샀다. 중화인민공화국과의 국경에 도달한 신동혁은 담배와 훔친 음식으로 비대원을 매수하고, 두만강을 건너 북한을 탈출하는데 성공한다. 중국을 떠돌며 노동일을 하던 신동혁은 상하이의 한 음식점에서 한 기자와 우연히 만난다. 신동혁의 탈북 경험이 가진 가치를 알아본 기자는 주중 대한민국 대사관에 보호를 요청하고, 신동혁은 곧 대한민국으로 보내지게 된다. 신원 확인을 위한 대한민국 정부의 심사를 거친 신동혁은 그의 경험을 토대로한 수기를 작성하고, 그의 이야기가 언론에 알려진다. 후원자의 초청으로 미국을 방문한 신동혁은 그곳에서 신인근이라는 그의 본래 이름에서 신동혁으로 개명하고, 북조선의 정치범 수용소의 현실을 알리기 위한 활동을 했다.[1] 이후 대한민국으로 다시 돌아온 신동혁은 북한 수용소 철폐를 위한 활동에 참여하고 있다. 2013년 6월 6일에 신동혁은 국제인권상을 수상하였다.[5]
14호 수용소로부터의 탈출[편집]

워싱턴 포스트의 동아시아 특파원을 지낸 블레인 하든은 신동혁과의 인터뷰를 토대로 2012년 "14호 수용소로부터의 탈출: 북한에서 자유 세계로 탈출한 한 탈북인의 놀라운 여정"을 출판했다. 자신의 자서전 성격의 이 책에서 신동혁은 어머니와 형의 처형 과정에서 그가 숨겨왔던 밀고 사실을 처음으로 밝혔다.[6][7]
증언 오류 시인[편집]

2015년 1월 18일, 신동혁은 자신의 증언중 일부가 사실이 아님을 인정하였다. 즉, 13살에 수용소에 수용된 것이 아니라 20살에 수용되었다는 것이 골자이며, 13살부터 20살까지 겪었다고 주장한 자서전의 여러 대목들이 모두 사실이 아니거나 혹은 나중에 일어난 일임을 간접적으로 인정한 것이다. 또한 14호 수용소가 아니라 18호 수용소에 갇혀있었다고 자서전 일부의 사실을 정정하기도 했다.[8]일부 탈북자 주장 신동혁의 탈북 이야기 “모두거짓”,[9]지난 2008년께 국정원 소속 직원이 주장 신동혁 “수용소 출신이 아니다”.[10]
북한 측의 반박[편집]

2014년 9월 24일 유엔주재 북한 상임대표부는 북한인권보고서 채택과 관련국들의 움직임에 반박하는 공보문을 발표하였는데, 이 가운데 '신동혁 자료 전문'이라는 첨부 자료가 포함되었다.[11][12] 이에 따르면 신동혁의 발언은 한국의 공작에 의한 날조이며, 신동혁 자신이 밝힌 자신과 가족에 대한 신상은 물론 수용소에 관한 내용도 사실이 아니라고 주장했다. 자료는 신동혁의 아버지가 국가재산략취행위로 교화소에 입소하기 전 처 장혜경과의 사이에서 맏아들 신경섭을 낳았다면서, 장혜경과 신경섭은 수용소에서의 도주 시도 때문이 아니라 살인죄로 사형되었다고 밝혔다. 또, 신동혁 역시 수용소에 있지 않았으며 불법 월경과 성범죄 등을 저지른 범죄자로 묘사하고 있다. 그러나 이러한 주장은 수용소 문제를 비롯한 북한인권 상황에 대한 신동혁의 일관된 주장에 비추어 볼 때 설득력이 떨어질 뿐만 아니라, 복수의 탈북자들이 증언한 북한체제의 잔혹성과 반인권적 처사와도 배치된다. 자국의 인권상황에 대한 북한 측의 반박은 수용소와 북한 인권 전반에 관한 실사를 통해서만 확인될 수 있으며, 북한 측이 이에 응하지 않는 한 탈북자들의 일관된 증언에 기초한 의혹은 해소되지 않을 것으로 보인다.
같이 보기[편집]
조선민주주의인민공화국의 인권
각주[편집]

↑ 이동:가 나 다 라 마 Harden, Blaine (2012년 3월 16일). “How one man escaped from a North Korean prison camp”. 《The Guardian》. 2012년 6월 15일에 원본 문서에서 보존된 문서. 2012년 3월 29일에 확인함.
↑ “I was a Political Prisoner at Birth in North Korea”. Life Funds for North Korean Refugees (NGO).
↑ “북한 14호 수용소 탈출 불가능 … 신동혁 말 믿지 않았다”, 중앙일보, 2015년 1월 31일
↑ “Escape from 'Total Control Zone' - North Korea's Papillon”. The Daily NK. 2007년 5월 11일. 2011년 7월 16일에 원본 문서에서 보존된 문서. 2012년 5월 30일에 확인함.
↑ Hinson, Tamara (2012년 4월 30일). “I thought the outside world was paradise, says the only North Korean to escape from prison camp”. London. 2012년 5월 1일에 확인함.
↑ “Review of Escape from Camp 14”. The New York Times. 2012년 4월 11일.
↑ 김신영 (2012년 4월 2일). “北 인권 적극 연구해야 할 사람은 한국인”. 《조선일보》. 2012년 5월 30일에 확인함.
↑ 탈북민 신동혁, 北정치범수용소 증언 오류 인정, 뉴시스, 2015년 1월 19일
↑ “그는 처음부터 18호 수용소에서 살았다”, 한겨레, 2016년 4월 1일
↑ <단독> 북한이 노리는 신동혁 미스터리 추적, 일요시사, 2016년 3월 17일
↑ “미국 및 일부나라,북 인권문제 음모공작 폭로”. 민족통신. 2014년 9월 14일.
↑ “북 유엔대표부 “인권고위급회의, 미 모략극” 반발”. 한겨레. 2014년 9월 14일.
자서전[편집]
Harden, Blaine (2012년 3월 29일). 《Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West》 (영어). 224쪽. ISBN 9780670023325.
외부 링크[편집]
블레인 하든의 인터뷰: Q&A with Blaine Harden, April 11, 2012. C-SPAN video library
“Born and raised in a concentration camp”. Google Tech Talks. – Shin Dong-hyuk talks about his experience in Kaechon internment camp
“The Hidden Gulag” (PDF). Committee for Human Rights in North Korea.[깨진 링크(과거 내용 찾기)] – Overview of North Korean prison camps with testimonies and satellite photographs
“Political Prison Camps in North Korea Today” (PDF). Database Center for North Korean Human Rights. 2013년 2월 28일에 원본 문서 (PDF)에서 보존된 문서. 2012년 7월 20일에 확인함. – Comprehensive analysis of various aspects of life in political prison camps
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Escape From Camp 14 by Blaine Harden – review
This account of one man's escape from the North Korean gulag is harrowing but important



Andrew Anthony

Fri 13 Apr 2012 16.00 AESTFirst published on Fri 13 Apr 2012 16.00 AEST




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Shin Dong-hyuk, the first and only person born in the North Korean gulag to have escaped. Photograph: The Washington Post/Getty Images


For outsiders, North Korea can seem less like a nation than a sick joke. What little information emerges from the world's most secretive state is almost too disturbing to process. A communist monarchy and impoverished nuclear power that relies upon slave labour and levels of repression that even George Orwell would have struggled to invent: it's as if Nineteen Eighty-Four was taken not as a critique but a blueprint.

But for North Koreans, like abused children, the grim reality of the Kim family dynasty is all they know. Until recently, full accounts of life in this famine-riven dystopia were hard to come by. Then a couple of years ago, Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy provided excoriating testimonies of refugees who had managed to escape into China and then on to South Korea. The picture those witnesses drew of North Korea was of one vast and brutal gulag.
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Now comes Escape From Camp 14, a still more harrowing account of the gulag within the gulag, the huge prison camps that litter the more remote provinces of this benighted country. Written by Blaine Harden, an experienced American journalist, it tells the extraordinary story of Shin Dong-hyuk, the only person born in the gulag to have escaped.

As with the terrors of Stalin and Mao, North Korea judges any crimes against the state as blood crimes. So when Shin's uncle committed the capital crime of escaping from the state, his remaining family were imprisoned for life. Although cohabiting is not allowed in the prison camp, Shin was the result of his parents being granted one of the rare conjugal permits.

He spent his childhood in unforgiving and unpaid labour, developing the survival skills – snitching and stealing – that were vital for a daily existence, constantly threatened by beating and starvation. At 13, when he learned that his mother and brother were planning to escape, he did what had become instinctive and betrayed them to the authorities. The pair were tortured before his mother was hanged and his brother shot. But Shin, too, was tortured, for weeks in an underground prison within the prison camp, within the prison state. He had upset one guard by giving his information on his mother's plot to another guard, rather than to him.


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The narrative, I should warn sensitive readers, is unyielding in its pain and despair. Except that Shin didn't despair, because despair requires hope and he possessed no hope. He could see no further than his next meal, which was often difficult enough to find. It was only meeting an older prisoner, a disgraced party official who had travelled abroad, that led him to start thinking of a world beyond the electric fence and beyond North Korea. The two planned an escape that only Shin, with no small luck, survived.

Eventually, after sneaking across the Chinese border and finding paid work for the first time in his life, he made his way to South Korea – not a straightforward journey because China, ever indifferent to human rights, sends asylum seekers back to North Korea.

Once in the south, like the majority of North Korean refugees, Shin struggled to settle. The South Korean state offers generous provisions for refugees, but the South Koreans themselves tend to view their northern neighbours as problem cases.

For Shin's part, having been guided from birth by nothing more complex than a desire to assuage pain and hunger, he remained unmotivated by South Korea's preoccupation with profit and competition.

He drifted around aimlessly for a while and then moved to the US, where, despite the support of refugee groups, he has also failed to find a position or place that he can nurture. The sense of chronic, and perhaps incurable, displacement is just one of the legacies of his appalling treatment in North Korea.

Survivors of the Nazi concentration camps also suffered long after their release, but at least they had group solidarity and a distinct place in history. No such consolations are afforded North Korean survivors.

First, they were practically bred to be pitted against one another, and second, as Harden notes: "While Auschwitz existed for only three years, Camp 14 is a 50-year-old Skinner box" – referring to BF Skinner's notorious behavioural experiments.

To some, perhaps many, this might appear to be a book that has few redemptive qualities. After all, what can be done with this knowledge of suffering? But it's important to recognise the depth of misery in North Korea, not just to be aware of the horror of the Kim regime, but also to stand as a testament to the plight of a terrorised people.

One other reason is to arm yourself against those misguided individuals who continue to see in North Korea an anti-imperialist challenge to the US. They may be rare, but they're not always without influence. One example is Andrew Murray, who, as an executive member of the Communist party of Britain, expressed his party's "solidarity" with Kim Jong-il's "People's Korea".

Murray now sits on the TUC general council and was until recently chair of the Stop the War coalition. Unfortunately, North Korea's war on its own people shows no sign of stopping.




The Casual Horrors of Life in a North Korean Hell




Shin Dong-hyuk, the subject of "Escape From Camp 14."Credit...Blaine Harden


By Janet Maslin
April 11, 2012








When Blaine Harden wrote his shocking 2008 profile of Shin Dong-hyuk for The Washington Post, Mr. Shin was living in Seoul, South Korea, and already a published author. He had written “Escape to the Outside World,” a 2007 Korean-language account of his horrific upbringing.

Mr. Shin was born in a North Korean forced-labor camp and then found his way to freedom. There were some problems with playing back this account verbatim. So Mr. Harden’s dramatic front-page article, “North Korean Prison Camp Escapee Tells of Horrors, Worries About Those Left Behind,” took care to include a disclaimer: “Shin’s story could not be independently verified, but it has been vetted and vouched for by leading human-rights activists and members of defector organizations in Seoul,” The Post article said.

Unfortunately, the disclaimer turned out to be necessary. As Mr. Harden now acknowledges in “Escape From Camp 14,” his blunt, best-selling book about Mr. Shin’s life, Mr. Shin had built his own memoir upon a gigantic lie.

In his account Mr. Shin claimed to have been a helpless innocent witness to the execution of his mother and brother when Mr. Shin was only 14. He had indeed been helpless, and he had the torture marks to prove it.


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But, as Mr. Harden discovered about a year into the interviewing process for this book, Mr. Shin’s original account omitted a crucial detail: He was responsible for the executions. He had snitched to a prison guard about an escape his mother and brother were planning, knowing full well that escape plans were punishable by death.


Mr. Shin admitted to Mr. Harden that he had made this trade-off to get more food and an easier job at school. And he said he had done it without regrets. He thought that his mother and brother deserved to die.

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“In writing this book, I have sometimes struggled to trust him,” Mr. Harden writes understandably in “Escape From Camp 14.” Mr. Harden tries to fathom a cryptic, troubled and not entirely sympathetic young man whose circumstances lend themselves to exaggeration.

What’s more, the new book uses dialogue borrowed from Mr. Shin’s disingenuous 2007 version. “Escape From Camp 14” also includes simple line drawings (as Mr. Shin’s book had) that give the most traumatic parts of his story — torture, imprisonment, maiming, executions — the look of action comics. The most benign of these pictures carries this caption: “Children in the camps scavenged constantly for food, eating rats, insects and undigested kernels of corn they found in cow dung.”


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Readers may well be won over by the sharp, declarative, young-adult style of Mr. Harden’s adventure writing. They will respond to urgent concern about conditions in North Korean prison camps, which are now visible via satellite photographs. And most misgivings about “Escape From Camp 14” will be outweighed by the power of a fast, brutal read.




ImageBlaine HardenCredit...Blake Chambliss


This is not a familiar prison camp story; as Mr. Harden points out, Shin Dong-hyuk is not Elie Wiesel. “God did not disappear or die,” Mr. Harden writes. “Shin had never heard of him.”

Mr. Shin did not spend his imprisonment missing love, joy, civilization or comfort, because he had never experienced such things. As the spawn of a “reward marriage” — considered “the ultimate bonus for hard work and reliable snitching” — he had no real family ties.

The book says that he regarded his mother as a rival for food and was right to do so; she once beat him with a hoe for eating her lunch. As a young child, he saw schoolmates maimed or even killed for minor transgressions and he learned to obey the camp’s totalitarian rules.

Much of this book’s impact comes from its nonstop parade of ghastly details. Mr. Harden writes of how prisoners harvested frozen human excrement — chipped from toilets — to make up for North Korea’s shortage of other fertilizer; how eating rats could help stave off pellagra; how a former North Korean Army officer in another camp, despairing, jumped down a coal mine shaft, hoping to die.

But “Shin’s misery never skidded into complete hopelessness,” Mr. Harden writes in typically plain, forthright style. “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.”

Not even the peremptory chopping off of part of Mr. Shin’s middle finger — an event that warrants only two paragraphs in Mr. Harden’s parade of horrors — was enough to set Mr. Shin’s escape plans in motion. What did it was the arrival of a worldly prisoner who made him realize what he was missing.


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“He explained that the world was round,” the book says of Park Yong Chul, the first person to tell Mr. Shin about a North Korean city called Pyongyang and about what it was like to eat grilled meat. “He fantasized about escaping with Park because he wanted to eat like Park.”

The escape provides one of the book’s grisliest stories, which is saying a lot. (Hint: “The human body is unpredictable when it comes to conducting electricity.”) And Mr. Shin finds himself outside the camp, alone. “Escape from Camp 14” follows his steps to China, then Seoul, then California and Seattle and on again (he now lives in Seoul and Washington), but it becomes less certain with each step forward. Just as Mr. Shin, “a scrawny, incurious and for the most part friendless child whose one source of certainty was the guards’ lectures about redemption through snitching,” is not a model prisoner, his is not a model redemption.

The book ends on an uncertain note, with Mr. Shin’s delivering a slick, carefully prepared speech about his own ordeal and the urgent need to liberate other North Korean prisoners. “In that speech, if not yet in his life, Shin had seized control of his past,” Mr. Harden writes cautiously.

But “Escape From Camp 14” offers no easy answers about how Mr. Shin can deal with a newly guilty conscience, a lack of introspection, a checkered work history and the difficult adjustment to post-traumatic life. He had remarkable powers of endurance against the toughest physical torment. Those powers are being tested still.