Americans’ sources of knowledge about life in North Korea are limited. We have access primarily to journalistic accounts of the diplomatic antics of the ruling Kim dynasty, which reveal practically nothing. However, there is a tiny number of credible and highly readable books written by Westerners with rare access to the facts. In recent years, two stand out. Nothing to Envy, by Barbara Demick. And, amazingly, a novel, The Orphan Master’s Son, by Adam Johnson. With Escape from Camp 14, veteran reporter Blaine Harden contributed the latest of these reports. In many ways it’s the most revealing. And in it he tackles the most sensitive aspect of life there: a North Korean prison camp.
Living in “an open-air cage run by men who hanged his mother”
Escape from Camp 14 chronicles the life of Shin Dong-hyuk. He’s one of only three people we know have ever escaped from a North Korean labor camp and made it to the West. Shin was born in the camp, his mother “assigned” to his father by guards to bear children. Both were prisoners. A superficial reading of Shin’s story might suggest that he is a monster. Reading the book will help you understand how he could commit unforgivable acts as natural and necessary steps in a ferocious day-to-day struggle for survival. As Harden explains, “His context had been twenty-three years in an open-air cage run by men who hanged his mother, shot his brother, crippled his father, murdered pregnant women, beat children to death, taught him to betray his family, and tortured him over a fire.”
Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West by Blaine Harden (2012) 210 pages ★★★★★
“Newborns clubbed to death with iron rods”
One of Harden’s North Korean expatriate sources shares the shocking reality. “‘Guards were free to indulge their appetites and eccentricities, often preying on attractive young women prisoners, who would usually consent to sex for better treatment. ‘If this resulted in babies, women and their babies were killed,’ [the source] said, noting that he had personally seen newborns clubbed to death with iron rods.”
When Shin fled Camp 14, it was not a vision of freedom that gave him the extraordinary courage required. It was thoughts of grilled meat. To understand this extraordinary statement, you’ll have to read the book.
Blaine Harden appeared recently in San Francisco at the World Affairs Council of Northern California. He joined in a conversation with Philip Yun, Executive Director of the Ploughshares Fund, a former U.S. diplomat who is Korean-American and has studied the peninsula for many years. Harden’s soft-spoken, sometimes light-hearted presentation underlined the surreal quality of Shin’s experiences inside the North Korean gulag. Responding to Yun’s questions, Harden spoke at some length about the many steps he had taken to verify Shin’s story.
The North Korean Gulag has lasted 12 times longer than the Nazi concentration camps
As Harden relates, “North Korea’s labor camps have now existed twice as long as the Soviet Gulag and about twelve times longer than the Nazi concentration camps. . . There are six camps, according to South Korea’s intelligence agency and human rights groups. The biggest is thirty-one miles long and twenty-five miles wide, an area larger than the city of Los Angeles.”
The author asks why there is so little awareness in the West about the North Korean camps. Why, he queries, have we done nothing about them/ As the Washington Post editorialized upon publishing Harden’s first account of Shin’s life: “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 [and Kim Jong Un’s] camps, and did nothing.”
About the author
Blaine Harden was a correspondent in Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia, as well as in New York and Seattle, for the Washington Post for 28 years. Later he worked for the New York Times as a national correspondent for four years among other reporting jobs. He has written six nonfiction books and has won numerous awards for his writing. It was on assignment to write the unwritten stories about North Korea for the Post that he encountered Shin Dong-hyuk.
Harden, born in 1952, is an alumnus of Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington. Blaine lives in Seattle with his wife and their two children.
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