A rare glimpse inside a North Korean prison camp:
SEOUL — 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.
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Shin does not want vengeance. He’ll settle for awareness.
“Kim Jong Il is a gangster,” he said. “If we kill him, we will be just like him.”
Instead, Shin wants South Koreans and the rest of the world to pay closer attention to what is happening to people still in those camps.
To that end, he tells his awful story — to anyone in South Korea who will listen, to human rights groups in Japan and, earlier this year, on a college tour of the United States.
An unforgettable — almost unfathomable — chapter of that story is about the execution of his mother, who was hanged in 1996, on the same day Shin’s only brother was shot to death. Both killings, Shin writes in his book, occurred at Camp No. 14 in a kind of public square, a place where he had seen many others executed.
Before he was taken to the square and ordered to watch them die, Shin said, he had spent seven months in an underground cell, where guards used torture to force him to talk about a supposed “family conspiracy” to escape from the camp.
Since his mother hadn’t told him about such a plan, Shin said, he was startled to hear of it. His torturers also 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.
Of course, the whole country is a prison camp, but Shin and his family obviously saw the worst of it.
