‘Escape from Camp 14’ - The Untold Story of North Korea’s Labour Camps

by Dulcie Langley

“High School students in America debate why President 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.” 

― Blaine Harden, Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West

Shin Dong-hyuk was born into a world where backbreaking labour is a given, children being beaten to death is frequent and the attendance of executions is mandatory. Here, human affection or familial love is not known to be a possibility. Relatives are but other competitors for the meagre resources that secure survival. Betraying your family to those in authority is actively required to stay alive.

This may sound like the stuff of a dystopian thriller, but it is in fact the stark reality of life in North Korea’s concealed political prisons. And there is no end in sight for the 150,000 to 200,000 people still held in brutal captivity.

Many in the general public have queried why the nations neglected to act more rapidly in ceasing the cruelty of Stalin and Hitler. However, the question of why the West is able to acknowledge the existence of such oppression in today’s world and yet fail to intervene remains largely unaddressed. The question of how it can do so ostensibly immune to guilt is perhaps more pressing, especially given North Korea’s labour camps have been in place twice as long as Soviet gulags and twelve times as long as the Nazi concentration camps.

Shin was born in Camp 14, one of five sprawling political prisons in the mountains of North Korea, located about fifty-five miles north of Pyongyang. When Shin’s uncle committed the capital crime of escaping from the state, his remaining family were all condemned to imprisonment until death. 'Guilt by association' is indeed legal in North Korea and a system of incarceration for the offender's extended family is employed. The only ambition Shin and his relations could aspire to in the camp was gaining redemption for another’s blood crime. Given cohabiting is strictly forbidden in the prison, Shin was the product of his parents being granted a rare conjugal permit. 

The labour camp is a ‘complete control district’. A no-exit prison - the only sentence is life. Inmates work 12-15 hour days in the camp - building dams, sewing military uniforms, mining coal - until they are either executed, killed in work-related incidents or die of illness triggered by excruciating hunger. In ‘Escape From Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey From North Korea To Freedom In The West’, Seattle journalist Blaine Harden exposes the secrets of this dark untold reality through Shin’s lens. The book is the result of more than two years of interviews. The aim was to distribute Shin’s story to the English speaking world, thus hopefully garnering the attention it so desperately deserves.

It is virtually impossible to illustrate the magnitude of inhumanity that is bred in North Korea’s political prisons. Blaine Harden describes that 'while Auschwitz existed for only three years, Camp 14 is a fifty-year-old Skinner box, an ongoing longitudinal experiment in repression and mind control in which guards breed prisoners whom they control, isolate and pit against one another from birth.' These are places so obscene one can scarcely envisage them. Rape, torture, beating and starvation are all but commonplace. On page one of the book’s preface, the reader is confronted with a retelling of Shin’s first memory - an execution. Shin recounts staring as three guards stuffed pebbles into a prisoner’s mouth, impeding him from cursing the state about to take his life. After the firing, a slack, blood-splattered body was wrapped and heaved onto a cart. 

Shin was four years old. 

A mere two pages later, Shin’s mother and brother are taken to the gallows and killed before his eyes. Perhaps more disturbing than the description of his mother twitching at the end of the rope, or of his brother receiving three shots from three separate guards, was Shin’s indifference in reaction. He simply recalls feeling relieved it was not him. He was resentful not towards the killers, but towards those killed for ever planning an escape. 

For in Camp 14, love, mercy and family were words without meaning. Shin's only state-prescribed objective was to receive his next meal. Abstract concepts that could hinder this raw goal to survive had never been taught to him. The idea that familial ties should imply a moral obligation was not known to exist. The relations he held with his kin paled into insignificance against those he had with the guards asserting absolute control - from these there was potential nourishment to gain.

Shin had never thought to be ashamed to beg a guard for forgiveness. His conscience had not felt stained by betraying a friend for food. He did not feel remorse in stealing his mother's lunch everyday, just as she felt none in beating him furiously for doing so.

In this life of naturalised horror, Shin didn't despair, because despair requires hope and he had never possessed any. God had not disappeared for Shin; he had never arrived.

No one born in Camp 14 or any other North Korean political prison had ever escaped. That was until Shin. On 2nd January 2005, Shin defied the odds by squirming through the electric fence designed to enslave him until death. After learning from older prisoners about the lands beyond the camp's seemingly impenetrable borders, and crucially about these lands' abundance of food, Shin began to plan how he might break free. Through a harrowing narrative of endurance, courage and unrepeatable strokes of luck, we follow Shin's journey to China, South Korea and then America.

The final portion of the book is just as illuminating in exposing the psychological implications of 'freedom' laced with guilt, allowing us a glimpse into the mind of someone who's final liberation is tainted with a sense of chronic displacement and shame. Shin must navigate new normals, constructs and dynamics we scarcely notice to be operating. Watching an individual so deeply indoctrinated into evil be removed from that environment, and subsequently have their perception of what life itself can be transformed, is both gut-wrenching and compelling. Shin states tragically, 'I have escaped physically. I haven't escaped psychologically.' The brutal brevity of the book does not leave us with the convenient idea that Shin's suffering is resolved. We gain an unforgiving understanding that this pain remains palpable, even as he progresses.

Now, Shin is a human rights activist, giving speeches around the world about the North Korean totalitarian regime still in motion. Whilst his overall physical health is currently excellent, his body remains a roadmap of trauma he experienced in Camp 14 - a prison that the North Korean government insists doesn't exist. Despite high resolution satellite photographs being visible to anyone with a simple Google Earth visit, North Korea maintains that such deplorable treatment of people does not happen within its borders.

In 2009, four years after Shin's miraculous escape, the North Korean Central News Agency declared that 'There is no human rights issue in this country, as everyone leads the most dignified and happy life.'

Indeed, while his bodily state has greatly ameliorated, Shin expresses that his mind is still plagued by self-loathing and a sense of failure, such as is consistent with survivors of political terror the world over. For example, those observed from the Nazi concentration camps. However, there is a disparity between these two groups of victims. Whilst no-one would ever dispute that those targeted by Hitler bore abhorrent hardship, at the very least they were afforded a distinct group solidarity and a consolidated place in history. No such 'luxuries' - if they can be deemed so - can be granted to survivors of North Korean brutality.

Alongside this, the legacy of the Kim dynasty continues. Hundreds of thousands of people are still trapped in the labour camps Shin slipped away from. He is left to grapple with the knowledge that the injustice he escaped endures. Acts of ruthlessness, such as when his teacher beat a six year old classmate to death for having five grains of corn in her pocket, persist in disfiguring North Korean lives, even if they are no longer present in his life in a fleshly form.

The book Escape from Camp 14 serves as a searing indictment of a heinous regime, and a poignant reminder that the depravity displayed by mankind during the World Wars is not something we have left behind. Such disturbing scenes are not exclusive to history texts or the realms of the fantasy novels; they can be seen today. In this merciless tale, Harden calls for the truth about what still occurs in our world to be summoned to the front of humanity's consciousness. No longer should uncomfortable information be allowed to dwell in a comfortable state of ignorance. The book is a mouthpiece for those whose voices remain muffled or silenced, engulfed by a chilling sea of international indifference.

North Korea's war on its own people shows no sign of stopping. This gripping memoir demands we not only recognise the depth of unspoken misery in the country, but to bring this topic into more widespread conversations about human rights abuse, so we might instigate change.