Shin Dong-Hyuk is the only known person born in a North Korean prison camp to escape. On Tuesday night he told a packed audience that they must help the 200,000 remaining:

“The first thing that I remember being told by the prison guard was that we were supposed to be dead a long time ago, but we were very lucky to have been granted another chance to live,” said Shin.

While information from the outside world has gradually filtered into North Korea, Shin was kept in ignorance, and felt no resentment:

“My fate was to live the life of a criminal, forever. I was never taught about the life outside of the prison camp, and the world in my thoughts consisted only of prison guards and prisoners.”

Journalist Blaine Harden, whose book Escape from Camp 14 tells Shin’s story, spoke of the “hideous cruelty” endured by Shin:

“His body is a map of the stories he tells. He was burnt on his back when he was 13, and has terrible scars. His legs are terribly scarred from electrical burns when he escaped through an electrical fence when he was 23. His middle finger is cut off, from when he dropped a sewing machine and was punished.”

The camps are used as “an instrument of terror”, Harden said, but also serve a second purpose:

“His parents were selected by the guards to breed, and he was bred very much like a farm animal, to be a slave in the camp. This is a story of a systematic dehumanisation that Shin brings to the world that no-one else has told.”

Shin’s upbringing by the guards was so carefully orchestrated that at the age of 13, he told them of his mother and brother’s talk of escape. The family were kept in an underground prison for seven months, before Shin’s mother was hung and his brother shot dead, in the execution ground he had first been taken at the age of four:

“When his mother was hung, she tried to catch his eye, and he refused to look at her,” Harden said, “He was angry with her because he thought she had betrayed him by talking about escape, by violating the camp rules – the only code of behaviour that he ever knew.”

It was only after crossing the North Korean border that Shin began to understand – and feel guilty about – the decision.

Shin said that while he is much better off physically since leaving Camp 14, he is under much greater stress mentally. He has learnt about the world’s history, and said he saw North Korea’s future at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.

In publishing Escape from Camp 14, Shin hopes he can promote action that sets aside diplomatic spats:

“My wish is that this time the international community can prevent further genocide from happening. When I give interviews and talks like this, I have nightmares for about a week afterwards. But I feel that this is the only thing that I can do to help them.”

Blane Harden’s harrowing account of North Koren prison escapee Shin Dong-hyuk.

By Jim Treadway

A packed house heard the touching and frightening story of Shin Dong-hyuk at the Frontline Club, told in Blaine Harden’s recently published book Escape from Camp 14: One man’s remarkable odyssey from North Korea to freedom in the West.

Shin Dong-hyuk is one of only three known prisoners to have escaped from North Korean prison camps over the last half century (he did so five years ago), and he is the only escapee to have been born and spent his entire life in a camp.  His parents were inmates paired up with the intent of breeding the most productive labor possible.  A slim, strong-jawed 28-year-old about 5’7’’in height, Shin Dong-hyuk sat in a smart grey suit and shared his story with composure, nodding solemnly to each point his interpreter shared, his manner occasionally bubbling forth with a moving, energetic sincerity.

“You’re supposed to be dead,” he recalled guards telling him as grew up.  The only redemption for criminals’ children, they told him, was hard work.  “My only care was to meet quotas, with no mistakes,” he related, his foreshortened middle finger marking the time as a boy when he dropped a sewing machine and had the top of the finger amputated as punishment.

In camp, one thing motivated Shin Dong-hyuk above all else, food.  Some corn and cabbage with a bit of salt comprised every meal of every day, and it turned him into “one of the mean people who betrayed others in camp… to get more food,” he admitted.  In the end, his sole inspiration for daring to escape was “the thought of spending one single day with a full belly.”

The most disturbing memory Shin Dong-hyuk shared was of his mother’s death.  Raised more by prison guards than by his parents, he had had it drilled into him that any mention of escape would be punished by execution, and even that failing to report others’ mentioning of escape would be punished with death as well.

One night while visiting his mother, a 13-year-old Shin Dong-hyuk overheard her and Xin’s brother mention escaping.  His heart pounded at the sound of the word, and he urgently sought a friend’s council about what to do.  They decided he should tell the authorities.  He later watched from a crowd as his mother was hanged and his brother was shot.

Shin Dong-hyuk remembered his mother looking into the crowd and meeting his eyes before her hanging.  He looked away, disgusted at her for betraying him by conspiring to escape.  Only in the last few years has he begun to feel and try to reconcile a sense of guilt in the affair.  But at the time, he had simply done what he had been taught his entire life was the right thing to do.

Shin Dong-hyuk finds purpose today in Christianity, sharing his story, and leading a monthly webcast attended by other North Korean refugees.  When an audience member asked what he wanted for his country, he rejected the goal of democracy.  “Every country claims to be a democracy,” he observed to an audience that chuckled in acknowledgment, “including North Korea.”  He simply wished for freedom.

In a world where North Korean diplomats end meetings at any mention of these prison camps or human rights abuses in the country, the prospects of the 200,000 inmates that still live in these camps today, let alone the 24 million citizens for whom “even the slightest mistake” can land them in jail as well, appear dim.

Meanwhile, as Harden pointed out, an international media that fixates on goose-stepping soldiers, the “funny appearance” of Kim Jong-il or his son, or the latest round of nuclear weapon saber-rattling, and which passes these stories off as “the news” about North Korea, misses the reality and detail of millions of North Koreans suffering unimaginable degradation under totalitarianism.

Psychologists have noted a profound distrust and paranoia in North Korean refugees, a natural result of the lives they have been conditioned to live.  Harden said that journalists have had an especially hard time encouraging North Koreans to share their experiences.  Gradually, however, he and Shin Dong-hyuk have built each other’s trust.  Harrowing as his story is, whether you believe it or not, what can be done to rectify it – as Shin Dong-hyuk put it a few times during the evening: “that is for you to decide.”

Little is known about the prison camps of North Korea where it is estimated that 200,000 are imprisoned. Many are born in the camps and generations of families are imprisoned because one of their relatives has been detained.

Shin Dong-Hyuk is one such case. He was born 26 years ago in Camp 14 in Pyeongan province, known as a ‘complete control district’, where the only sentence is life.

For most of his life all he knew was the camp, working 12 to 15-hour days mining coal, building dams or sewing military uniforms. If inmates were not executed they were killed in work-related accidents or died of an illness usually triggered by hunger.

But after the execution of his mother and brother, Shin Dong-Hyuk decided to try and escape. No one born into a North Korean prison camp has ever escaped before.

Shin Dong-Hyuk will be joining us at the Frontline Club with Blaine Harden whose book Escape from Camp 14; One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West recounts his extraordinary journey.

Blaine Harden is an author and journalist who reports for PBS Frontline and contributes to The Economist. He worked for The Washington Post as a correspondent in Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia, as well as in New York and Seattle. He was also a national correspondent for The New York Times and writer for the Times Magazine.

Chaired by Charles Scanlon, Asia Pacific editor at BBC World Service and formerly BBC correspondent in Japan and South Korea from 2000 to 2007.