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1980s onwards: Life inside Camp 14, one of five sprawling political prisons in the mountains of North Korea
Escape from Camp 14
What you need to know before your trail
Twenty-seven years ago, Shin Dong-hyuk was born inside Camp 14, one of five sprawling political prisons in the mountains of North Korea. Located about fifty-five miles north of Pyongyang, the labor camp is a ‘complete control district,’ a no-exit prison where the only sentence is life.
No one born in Camp 14 or in any North Korean political prison camp has escaped. No one except Shin. This is his story.
Locations
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North Korea – the hermit kingdom
“North Korea is isolated and hungry, bankrupt and belligerent. It is also armed with nuclear weapons. Between 150,000 and 200,000 people are being held in its political prison camps, which have existed twice as long as Stalin’s Soviet gulags and twelve times as long as the Nazi concentration camps. Very few born and raised in these camps have escaped. But Shin Donghyuk did.”
““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.”
“Most North Koreans are sent to the camps without any judicial process, and many die there without learning the charges against them. They are taken from their homes, usually at night, by the Bowibu, the National Security Agency. Guilt by association is legal in North Korea. A wrongdoer is often imprisoned with his parents and children. Kim II Sung laid down the law in 1972: ‘[E]nemies of class, whoever they are, their seed must
be eliminated through three generations.”
BookTrail Boarding Pass: Escape from Camp 14
Destination:North Korea Author/guide: Blaine Harden Departure: 1980s onwards
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