Escapee tells of prison-camp horror
There are 14,431 North Korean defectors living in South Korea, according to the latest government count. Shin Dong-hyuk is the only one known to have escaped to the South from a prison camp in the North.
By Blaine Harden
The Washington Post
SEOUL, South Korea — In Camp No. 14, the North Korean political prison where Shin Dong-hyuk was born and where he says he watched the hanging of his mother, inmates never saw a picture of Kim Jong Il.
"I had no idea who he is," Shin said, referring to the leader whose photograph is displayed nearly everywhere in North Korea.
Inmates did not need to know the face of their "Dear Leader," as Kim is called. Behind electrified fences, they tended pigs, tanned leather, collected firewood and labored in mines until they died or were executed.
The exception is Shin, who is 26 and lives in a small rented room in Seoul. He is a thin, short, shy man, with quick, wary eyes, a baby face and sinewy arms bowed from childhood labor. There are burn scars on his back and left arm from where he was tortured by fire at age 14, when he was unable to explain why his soon-to-be-hanged mother had tried to escape. The middle finger of his right hand is cut off at the first knuckle, punishment for accidentally dropping a sewing machine in the garment factory at his camp.
There are 14,431 North Korean defectors living in South Korea, according to the latest government count. Shin is the only one known to have escaped to the South from a prison camp in the North.
Shin's story could not be verified independently, but it has been vetted and vouched for by leading human-rights activists and members of defector organizations in Seoul. They came to know Shin when he arrived in South Korea in 2005 and was hospitalized with post-traumatic stress disorder.
"At first, I could not believe him because no one ever succeeded in the escape," said Kim Tae-jin, president of the Democracy Network Against North Korean Gulag and a defector from North Korea who spent a decade in another concentration camp there. The No. 15 camp where Kim was confined — unlike Shin's No. 14 — sometimes released political prisoners, as it did Kim, if they were "fully revolutionized."
"I saw too many prisoners executed before my eyes for attempting to escape," Kim said. "No one made it out, except for Shin."
Hidden prison camps
The U.S. government and human-rights groups estimate that 150,000 to 200,000 people are being held in the North's prison camps. Many camps can be seen in satellite images, but North Korea denies their existence.
In recent weeks, Shin has been watching old films of the Allied liberation of Nazi concentration camps, which included scenes of bulldozers unearthing corpses that Adolf Hitler's collapsing Third Reich had tried to hide.
"It is just a matter of time before Kim Jong Il thinks of this," Shin said. "I hope that the United States, through pressure and persuasion, can convince Kim not to murder all those people in the camps."
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