December 22, 2008
When Shin Dong-hyuk found three kernels of corn in a pile of cow dung, he quickly fished them out, wiped them clean, and ate them. “As miserable as it may seem,” writes Shin, “that was my lucky day.”
Shin eventually escaped from Camp No. 14, a North Korean prison camp for political prisoners. The Washington Post published its article about him on December 11, 2008, one day after the sixtieth anniversary of the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a milestone that received scant coverage.
The contrast between Shin’s story of “the ‘common and routine’ savagery of the camp” and the high ideals of the Universal Declaration could not be more jolting.
According to the Post, Shin, who now lives in South Korea, appears to be the only person ever to escape from Camp 14, a camp from which no one is ever released. He was one of the estimated 150,000 to 200,000 people imprisoned in the North Korean camps, many because of their Christian faith.
Shin was born in the camp, the fruit of its inhumanity. His mother was the sexual prize given to his father for his good work as a mechanic. In the camp beatings, torture, and executions are commonplace.
Shin bears the literal scars.
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.
Just before his torture, suspended naked over an open charcoal fire, Shin discovered why he was in Camp 14:
His torturers… surprised him by telling him, for the first time, why he and his family were in the camp. Two of his father's brothers had collaborated with South Korea during the Korean War and then fled to the South, the guards told him. His father was guilty because he was the brother of traitors. Shin was guilty because he was his father’s son.
Guilt by association is policy in North Korea. David Hawk of the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea writes in The Hidden Gulag:
Former prisoners and guards trace this practice to a 1972 statement by “Great Leader” Kim Il Sung: “Factionalists or enemies of class, whoever they are, their seed must be eliminated through three generations.”
