Escape from Camp 14

Starvation

More people are escaping from North Korea into China, but Shin Dong-hyuk is the only known escapee from a North Korean prison camp who was born and raised within its electrified fences. Faced with famine since 1990, North Korea is a brutal dictatorship under hereditary rule. It has no oil, never developed its hydroelectric capabilities, and uses ash and excrement as fertilizer. North Korea denies the existence of its prison camps housing some 200,000 people, but the desolate fenced zones are visible on Google Earth.

Shin was born in 1983 or 1984 in Camp 14, one of North Korea’s biggest, most brutal prisons for dissidents and their families. His home had no furniture, mattress, running water or privacy, nor did it have much heat, electricity or food. A single light bulb hanging from the ceiling of a kitchen that several families shared gave the only indoor light, flickering just an hour before dawn and a few hours after sunset. Shin’s mother, Jang Hye Gyung, was a short brick of a woman. Years later, Shin said he had loved her in his way, perhaps more in retrospect, but while living in the camp he was incapable of even a primitive emotional life. Camp 14 ...