Ex-prisoner speaks out about life spent in brutal, harrowing conditions.
By JOOHEE CHO
Oct. 30, 2007 —
The first two days of torture started with threatening questions about
his family's conspiracy. Shin Dong-Hyuk had no answers because at age
14, he was required to live in the dormitory with other teenagers in
North Korea's notorious political prison camp No.14, north of
Pyongyang. He had not seen his parents and brother for weeks.
The next morning, Shin was hung upside down with his ankles
cuffed, all day long. He wondered why his mother and brother tried to
escape, if what the authorities claimed was true. Surely, they should
have known that anything short of being out of place in this camp is
punished by death.
On the fourth day Shin was dragged into cell No.7, the secret
underground torture chamber. Completely stripped, legs cuffed, hands
tied with rope, his legs and hands were hung from the ceiling. The
torturers lit up a charcoal fire under his back. He struggled. But they
pierced a steel hook near Shin's groin to keep him from writhing. Amid
the sounds and smells of flesh burning, Shin then blacked out.
Eleven years after that day, Shin Dong-Hyuk is now standing
high in Seoul, South Korea, signing autographs in his recently
published book "Escape to the Outside World," which is about his life
in the North Korean prison camp. He's spreading the word about the
brutal North Korean regime and making plans for a new life of freedom.
But none of it would be possible if not for a daring, tragic escape.
Born Behind Barbed Wire
In 2005, Shin successfully escaped the prison camp where he was
born, raised and repeatedly tortured. It took a month for him to sneak
to the border where he bribed his way into China. After 17 months of
seeking refuge, he was granted defector status by the South Korean
government last year.
Shin's parents were granted marriage inside the camp for being
model prisoners. They spent five days together as an award, and
separated again in accordance with the prison rule. Shin has little
memory of his father and brother because everyone above 12 years old
was to live in separate dormitories of same age and sex. He lived with
his mother until age 12, but he has no attached feelings.
"She never hugged me, never," he recalled.
Shin's schooling involved reading, writing and simple adding and
subtracting. Children were beaten to death in front of others for
stealing five grains of wheat out of hunger. Girls were raped and
protesting mothers disappeared. He witnessed his own mother offering
sex to guards. Teenagers were buried under cement while being forced to
build power plants. Shin's middle-finger knuckle was cut off as
punishment for dropping a sewing machine. And he watched the public
executions of his mother and brother after their failed escape.
But for Shin, that was the way it was. "I didn't think the world I lived in was wrong. I was born to it," he said.
He has known no other alternative. He also did not even know of the Dear Leader Kim Jong-Il nor the late-founder Kim Il-Sung.
"People are surprised when I say I didn't know about them. I really did not hear those names inside the camp," said Shin.
Human rights activists say the political prisoners condemned to
die in those prison camps are not considered fit to be trained
ideologically. "They are simply not treated as one of the people," said
Tim Peters at Helping Hands Korea.
"I thought it was only natural that I pay for my parents' sins with hard labor," recalled Shin.
An Escape Born of Curiosity
His hope in life was to be a model prisoner and be granted marriage
like his father -- that is, until he learned another world existed
outside camp No.14. A new inmate who had been in China and other Asian
countries told him stories and taught him his first song. Shin had
never heard a song, let alone music of any sort except the bells that
rang to signal time of day.
So when he agreed to escape the barbed wires of his prison camp
with the new inmate, it was not that he felt injustice or anger. Shin
said he was "just curious, that's all." His fellow escapee died burnt
and stuck to the electric wired fences -- a tragic twist, but for Shin
it created an opportunity. He was able to safely crawl over the dead
body as protection from getting electrified.
Crawling through, his legs got caught temporarily, leaving
another unforgettable scar in addition to his burnt back and cut
knuckle. But as he ran bleeding to find the new world, he did not
imagine where he stands now.
In South Korea, Shin is telling the world about the secret
atrocities of the North Korean regime and the political prison camp
No.14. He gave testimony at Britain's House of Lords this year and
hopes to do the same in the United States Congress. Privately, he
dreams of going to college and becoming a policeman. - - - -
All That My Father Asked of Me
Sunday, September 30, 2007; [The Washington Post] B08
Although our family left South Korea
to begin a new life in America
over 30 years ago, I didn't know that my North Korea-born father was such an
American patriot until the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
While I was growing up, my father was the
epitome of the silent type, never raising his voice yet guiding his children by
how diligently he worked as the owner-operator of a tiny dry cleaning business
in Yonkers, the blue-collar New York City suburb.
He left at 6 in the morning and returned home
at 8 at night with the dirt and smell of his work clinging to him. Even in the
face of some business or family crisis, he would be silent, offering no excuses
and exhibiting no emotion. The next morning, he would go off to face the mounds
of clothes as usual.
My father rarely talked about his childhood in
Pyongyang. He
never mentioned that he had been accepted to medical school in Moscow on a full scholarship before the
Korean War obliterated that option. He never talked about escaping alone to the
South when he was 16, and he still doesn't know what happened to his mother and
baby sister. He never talked about fighting in the Korean War at 17, though
when my brother and I were little, he let us play with the scar that a North
Korean bullet left across his chest.
These details we got in rare bits and pieces
from our Mom, who isn't exactly voluble herself.
I never even knew my father spoke six
languages -- Korean, English, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and Russian -- until I
was in college. And there I was, all smug about being able to speak Korean,
English and some Spanish.
This was the father I knew -- silent,
hardworking and very Korean -- until he called me a few months after Sept. 11
and told me to come home. For the first time in memory, he said he wanted to
talk to me.
So I was on the next plane to New York. When I
arrived, expecting the worst, it was past midnight. My father was waiting in
his car. He said he wanted to go for a drive into the city and handed me the keys.
He told me to head downtown along Fifth
Avenue.
All the way, he was quiet. But as we
approached Washington
Square Park,
I stopped the car without my father having to tell me to. The absence was so
striking. The twin towers of the World
Trade Center,
usually framed by the Washington Square Arch, were gone. There was just an
eerie glow where they used to be.
Then, for the first time in my life, my father
asked me for a favor. He asked me to quit my job and go to work for the U.S.
government, in whatever capacity it would take me.
My initial reaction was to dismiss this as
ridiculous. I was chief of staff for the founder of an international consulting
firm and the fastest-rising executive in the company's history. I had a
guaranteed, financially secure future. This was the American dream for which my
parents had sacrificed all their lives. And he wanted me to go back to school
and apply to become a government bureaucrat?
Like any other American, I was deeply affected
by Sept. 11. Three students from my high school were killed that day. But this
was out of the question. I couldn't give up what I had worked so hard for.
Then he said something that stopped my breath.
He said: "Please." My father, who, along with my mother, had slaved
in a stifling dry cleaners for more than 20 years for his children, felt the
need to say please to his son.
He talked about gratitude. His gratitude to
America for allowing a North Korean orphan to take care of his family and send
his sons to the best schools in the world. His sense of thankfulness at being
granted the freedom and privilege to make his life worthwhile for his family.
He said that real patriotism came from acting on your sense of gratitude for
your country, not just talking about it. Having one of his sons contribute to
the protection of America
was his only way to pay back what he had received. I hadn't known my father was
such an eloquent man.
So, finally, this June, I began my new life as
a bureaucrat, working at the Transportation Security Administration. Along with
50,000 proud colleagues, I am responsible for safeguarding America's
freedom of movement for both people and goods.
My father is quietly ecstatic and plans,
finally, to retire. He is 75. And he is a Korean American patriot.
-- Jason Lim
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