Fourteen-year-old Shin In Geun watched when North Korean military guards hanged his mother and shot his brother three times. Their crime: attempting to escape from Camp 14, a prison for political enemies of North Korea.
As he watched them die, Shin knew he was responsible. The first rule of Camp 14 says, “Anyone caught escaping will be shot immediately.” On the night of his mother and brother’s attempted flight, Shin had overheard them making plans. He was angry at them for putting him at risk; family members of prisoners who attempt to escape are tortured and often killed. To save himself, Shin decided to turn them in.
Informing on family members is not uncommon in the camps. Camp guards train children from birth to snitch on their parents, siblings, and peers. As a reward, informers receive food and leniency from the guards.
Shin felt no remorse when his mother and brother were killed. He himself had just returned from several months of torture in a secluded underground prison where camp guards scalded his skin and hung him by hooks. At that moment, Shin was relieved they were dead and he was still alive.
There are over 200,000 men and women in North Korean political labor camps like Camp 14. “Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West” chronicles the life of Shin, the only known prisoner born inside a North Korean labor camp ever to have escaped. Journalist Blaine Harden tells Shin’s story, beginning with a childhood marked by starvation, hard labor, and mistreatment, his torture at the hands of North Korean guards, his furtive escape and journey across the Chinese border, and his final adjustment to life in the West.
Concise and well-written, the book cuts to the nerves. It lacks the philosophical undertones of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago or the psychological conclusions of Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning.” The book is instead a minimalist telling of one man’s experience of the greatest contemporary human rights violation. Harden’s honest presentation of the facts gives it real potency. You can’t help but read about Shin and think: “This nightmare is going on right now.”
Prisoners in Camp 14 and others like it live in huts with no toilets or running water. They are forced to work hard labor, many of them in mines where early accidental deaths are common. Shin recalls seeing one girl’s toe crushed under a coal car and amputated without anesthetics or antibiotics.
Food is scarce and starvation is a real possibility. As a child, Shin remembers his mother beating him for eating her small food ration. Guards at his school beat children for stealing dropped kernels of corn off the frozen ground. Competition for food and pressure from camp guards to inform on prisoners who steal or act suspicious break down familial and fraternal bonds. Children like Shin feel no love for their parents.
They are told from birth that they carry in them the sins of their mothers and fathers.
Considering the horrors Harden exposes, the book’s lack of an obvious political agenda is remarkable. He lets the facts speak for themselves. Reading the book makes you feel like you’re having coffee with Shin, and Harden is just there to translate his story.
Every few chapters, Harden provides the reader with necessary insight into North Korean political history, but the real story is about Shin. The book allows the reader to realize the significance of Shin’s story, particularly in light of recent sanctions enacted by the UN against North Korea, the US decision to build more missile defenses to counter North Korean attacks, and Kim Jung Eun’s latest announcement breaking the 1953 armistice.
Only once does Harden bring up the topic of awareness and a possible role for the West in stopping these crimes against humanity. In his introduction, Harden quotes from a “Washington Post” editorial of 2008, noting, “High school students in America debate why President Franklin D. Roosevelt didn’t bomb the rail lines to Hitler’s camps. Their children may ask, a generation from now, why the West stared at far clearer satellite images of Kim Jong Il’s camps, and did nothing.”
Contemporary readers of “Escape from Camp 14” may already be asking that very question.
ehamilton@hillsdale.edu