Interviews with Shin Dong-hyuk

There was no special or particular reason why I decided to escape the prison camp. Looking back now, it was a surprising, almost ridiculous reason why I decided to escape.

I heard about the outside world from a newly arrived prisoner, who had lived outside the camp. He told me about the kind of food people ate outside the camp.

After hearing this, the desire to eat whatever food one wanted — eating — is what made me decide to escape.//

The best way to describe the food that I ate in the prison camps is basically corn and salted vegetables. That´s all I remember eating.

We produced other types of food as manual laborers inside the prison camps, but we were not allowed to eat what we produced.

Of course, in the prison camp, there were armed guards that surrounded the facility. There was also an electrified fence.

Those two things were great challenges in my escape attempt, but still I had the desire to eat, despite those challenges.

I thought that even if I were to die tonight, as long as I died with a full stomach, having eaten what I wanted, it would be worth getting killed.

That desire to eat, that freedom to eat whatever I wanted to eat, was what compelled me to escape.

During my escape, as I crossed [the camp’s perimeter], my legs were caught in the electrified fence, and I still bear the scars from that injury.

There was not much I could do once I crossed the fence and escaped from the prison camp. It was winter time so it was very cold. It was night time so it was very dark.

I had to steal clothes to change out of my prison uniform. I basically ended up stealing whatever food I could from houses. That is how I survived immediately after escaping from the prison camp.

There were many times I went hungry, but looking back, I was fortunate for not freezing to death in the cold.

When I saw the life that existed, the world that existed outside the prison camp, looking back now, I would use the word “heaven” to describe what I saw.

People outside the camp were walking around freely wearing whatever clothes they like. Laughing and singing.

These were new things for me and I was filled with curiosity.

I crossed the border into China in 2005. Of course, looking back now, after South Koreans have studied this issue, it wasn´t that difficult compared to how it is now for North Koreans to cross the border into China.

[Since coming to power in 2011, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un has cracked down on defectors attempting to leave North Korea. Kim Jong Un (1983 – ) is the supreme leader of North Korea. He is the son of Kim Jong Il (1941 – 2011) and the grandson of Kim Il Sung (1912 – 1994)]

Many people were doing it, and during my escape through North Korea, I overheard many people talking about China, and about how things were better in China.

So I decided to go to China as well.

I crossed the river at night time. I was lucky in terms of my situation, and how I crossed over into China.

After living for about a year in hiding and working in the northeastern part of China where there was intense surveillance and monitoring by the Chinese authorities regarding North Korean refugees, I decided to go further south.

During my journey to the southern part of China, I came into contact with a South Korean citizen. He told me about the South Korean embassy and led me there.

That is where I was processed and I knew that the embassy was a safe haven, a safe place, and that I would be taken to South Korea, to a safe country.

Shin Dong Hyuk is the only known person to be born in a North Korean gulag and escape to freedom. In North Korea, whole families are incarcerated for the offenses of a single family member. As many as 130,000 men, women and children are imprisoned in North Korea’s vast system of gulags.

Shin was born in 1982 in Camp 14, the product of a “reward marriage” between two prisoners. He lived with his mother until the age of 12, though they never formed a true familial bond. Shin received a basic education before being pressed into the camp’s labor force. During this time, he witnessed fellow children being beaten, executed and killed in work-related accidents.

In 1996, prison officials brought Shin to a separate detention facility where he was tortured. He had no idea why this was happening to him. Finally, the guards explained that his mother and brother had attempted to escape and they wanted more information. After being held in an underground cell for seven months, Shin was forced to attend the public execution of his mother and brother.

In 2005, Shin and another prisoner were assigned to work on a mountain. Driven by hunger, the two decided to escape over the electrified fence enclosing the camp. Shin’s leg was caught in the fence and scarred, but he managed to get through; the other prisoner was electrocuted and died. From there, Shin managed to cross the border into China where he worked as a laborer for several years until connecting with a journalist who brought him to the South Korean Embassy. From there, Shin escaped China.

Shin’s incredible story has been shared with the world in the book, Escape from Camp 14, by American journalist Blaine Harden. Since escaping, Shin has become a leading voice on North Korean human rights and the country’s gulag system, including providing testimony at the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea).

North Korea (the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) is a country of 23 million people in northeast Asia, ruled by Communist dictator Kim Jong-Un. His deceased predecessors—father, Kim Jong-Il, and grandfather, Kim Il-Sung – respectively retain the titles of “Eternal President” and “The Great Leader.”

The Korean War began in 1950, when Kim Il-Sung, backed by the Soviet Union and China, attacked South Korea. The conflict ended in a cease-fire rather than a peace treaty, and the border between the two Koreas remains tense and heavily militarized.

Kim Il-Sung employed harsh tactics to consolidate his power and propagated an extreme personality cult that has been continued by his successors. A blend of communist doctrine, state terror, xenophobia and hyper-nationalism has given North Korea its unique ideology. Despite some recent openings, North Korea remains largely isolated from the rest of the world.

With the end of Soviet communism and withdrawal of economic support, North Korea’s economy collapsed in the 1990s. A massive famine, aggravated by the regime’s indifference, killed as many as 2 million people between 1994 and 1998. While conditions have improved, even today, North Korea faces problems of malnutrition and insufficient access to food.

Tensions between North and South Korea remain high. In 2010, North Korea sank a South Korean naval vessel, killing 46 sailors and attacked a South Korean island, killing four civilians. North Korea has developed and tested nuclear weapons in contravention of several international agreements. The country withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 2003 in order to test ballistic missiles and eventually a nuclear device. Multilateral negotiations have so far failed to constrain North Korea’s arms buildup and nuclear program.

North Korea is among the world’s most repressive states, engaging in widespread and systematic human rights violations, including extrajudicial executions, torture, forced abortion, arbitrary detention, and denial of the rights of expression, association, assembly, and religion. The government pervasively regulates all aspects of the lives of its citizens, each of whom is categorized as “core,” “wavering,” or “hostile,” according to the history of his or her family’s relationship with the regime. Access to housing, employment, education, and other social and economic goods depend heavily on these security classifications. The government determines where each citizen will live, and travel within the country is strictly limited.

Emigration is prohibited. Refugees who have escaped to China have frequently been forcibly returned to North Korea where they are imprisoned, subjected to torture and other ill-treatment, and sometimes executed. The government operates a network of forced labor camps for an estimated 120,000 political prisoners. While persons convicted of ordinary crimes serve fixed sentences, those convicted of political crimes are confined indefinitely. Punishment is extended to three generations – the offender’s parents, siblings, and children are also incarcerated, as a way to pressure North Koreans to conform. Political offenders are often denied food, clothing, and medical care, and many die in prison.

Freedom House’s Freedom in the World report classifies North Korea as “not free” and as one of nine nations whose lack of political rights and civil liberties are considered the “worst of the worst.”