Escape from Camp 14

One day, a teacher conducted an unannounced search on Shin and his classmates and found that a girl had been stealing corn. He beat her until she collapsed, and some of her classmates carried her home. She died later that night. Prisoners were taught that punishment was just and fair, and no one mentioned the incident the next day.

There were various other rules that were enforced in school: absences were not permitted, regardless of how sick a student might be, and questions were not allowed. This meant that the teachers could shape the minds of their students without being subjected to unwanted queries about the outside world. Trust between students was also made difficult due to the pressure to inform on one another, as well as the constant competition for food.

Shin and his classmates were barely literate when they entered secondary school, but this did not matter, given that school was a training ground for working in mines and fields. Shin entered his first coal mine aged 10, but students did not spend all of their time engaged in manual labor—they also spent considerable time finding fault with themselves and one another. If a student was disobedient, the teacher would order their classmates to punish them by means of physical violence, which they did without a second thought.

When he was nine years old, Shin came into contact with the North Korean caste system. This occurred when he and his classmates were walking towards a train station to pick up coal, which involved passing by the Bowiwon compound. This was where the guards’ children lived, and these children proceeded to pelt the other students with rocks. To the Bowiwon children, Shin and his classmates were tainted with sin on account of their lineage, whereas they themselves were from lineage sanctified by the “Great Leader.”

Kim Il Sung had created a blood-based hierarchy in 1957; indeed, despite professing allegiance to communist ideals, North Korea features one of the most rigid caste systems in the world. Members of the top-level “core” class can obtain high-ranking jobs in the government, military, and intelligence services, while members of the neutral or wavering class (the next step down) are soldiers, teachers, or technicians. The lowest class was known as the hostile class, which is composed of people who were suspected of opposing the government, along with their descendents. Individuals in this class typically work in mines and factories.

The caste system does not only affect a person’s career but also their location, as the core class is permitted to live in and around Pyongyang (North Korea’s capital), while many members of the hostile class are resettled to provinces along the Chinese border. Members of the wavering class, meanwhile, can sometimes move up the social ladder by joining the Korean People’s Army. Some traders from the core and wavering classes have also become wealthy due to the rapid growth of private markets, which has allowed them to obtain high living standards. However, as far as government positions go, lineage decides virtually everything.

An Myeong Chul is an example of the kind of person deemed sufficiently trustworthy to serve as a prison guard. He was the son of a North Korean intelligence officer and worked in several labor camps; however, he fled to China when his father (who supervised regional food production) got into trouble with his superiors and subsequently killed himself. In an interview carried out in 2009, he explained that guards were instructed to view prisoners as “dogs and pigs” (36). Guards were free to prey on female prisoners, who would comply with their demands in exchange for better treatment, and the guards could win admission to a college if they caught prisoners trying to escape. These incentives were often unnecessary, however, as guards would beat prisoners simply because they were bored or in a bad mood.

Though the guards and their children form part of the core class, they are fringe functionaries—the “core of the core” lives in Pyongyang and trusted members of the elite are sometimes allowed to travel outside the country. One such individual, Kim Kwang Jin, told the author that he had collected millions of dollars from some of the world’s major insurance companies as a result of falsified claims for industrial accidents and natural disasters. This formed part of a state-run insurance scam, and, over time, reinsurance companies “got wise to frequent and costly claims for train crashes and ferry sinkings that were all but impossible to investigate” (40). As these companies had signed documents that bound them to North Korean law, there was little that they could do. Still, the publicity these cases generated warned other reinsurance companies to avoid doing business with North Korea.

While Kim Kwang Jin was engaged in this lucrative fraud, Kim Jong Il rewarded him with gifts such as fruit, blankets, and home electronics. These gifts may seem meager, but even the elite in Pyongyang do not live as well as the average family living in Seoul. The Kim family is the exception, however, with satellite images revealing large country houses featuring basketball courts, movie theaters, and shooting ranges.

Kim Jong Il inherited dictatorial control of North Korea from his father in 1994, and, upon his own death in 2011, Kim Jong Eun became leader of the country. This was accompanied by a surge of propaganda hailing the new leader as a “lighthouse of hope” (42). Still, whereas Kim Jong Il had already, effectively, been running the country before he became its official leader, Kim Jong Eun had not established such a position prior to 2011. He has therefore had to depend on “privileged blood, a budding cult of personality, and the loyalty of relatives, courtiers and generals who may or may not be content to stand in the shadows” (43).

The book starts out by summarizing the key events of Shin’s life and pointing out his unique status: while he is not the only person to have escaped from a North Korean labor camp, he is the only known escapee who was born into one. The author also refers to the political situation in North Korea, emphasizing the fact that the government denies the existence of labor camps—despite clear satellite evidence to the contrary. As we see from the beginning of the book, there is a stark contrast between the lives of the Kim dynasty (which rules over North Korea) and individuals such as Shin.

From the outset, the book also establishes the difference between people who are born in the camp and those who have experience of the outside world. Concepts such as love, family, guilt, compassion, and hope are foreign to prisoners such as Shin, whose minds have been shaped by life in the camp. It is only in later chapters that Shin starts to fathom the outside world and to question the life that he has lived thus far.

Shin’s experience can be situated within the wider political climate of North Korea, and the author provides key information about the country’s labor camps. These camps are vast in size, hold a large number of prisoners, and have been around far longer than Nazi concentration camps. Guards are given free rein to exercise brutality, and public executions take place every year. Despite all this, many prisoners do not even know why they are in the camps.

The key tenet here is guilt by association, with individuals being held responsible for the actions of family members. Shin even witnessed his own mother’s execution, though he was initially reluctant to discuss the details. Still, he said that he was furious with her and blamed her for the torture to which he had been subjected. As the book proceeds, readers come to understand the reason for both Shin’s anger and his initial reticence to go into details about his mother’s death.

In the book’s introduction, the author discusses his own background and interest in these issues. While working as a journalist in Northeast Asia, he was conscious of how efficiently North Korea’s repressive regime functioned, having succeeded in sealing itself off almost completely from outsiders. As foreign reporters are rarely allowed inside North Korea, Shin provided valuable insight into the oppression and brutality that had enabled the Kim family to sustain itself. Harden had already written an article about Shin, but he felt that this was insufficient. Despite the horrors of the camps and clear evidence of their existence, there has been a striking lack of response to the human rights atrocities occurring in North Korea. This book therefore seeks to further highlight the issue by delving into Shin’s life story.

Shin’s own motivations in telling his story echo those of the author. He asserts that he does not want to draw attention to himself—he is ashamed of some of his actions—but he wants the world to take notice of what is going on in North Korea.

Having prefaced Shin’s experience, the book goes on to detail life in the camp; in particular, Shin’s distant and antagonistic relationship with his family. It is established that Shin’s parents consented to a form of arranged marriage that was sometimes offered to prisoners as an incentive for good behavior. However, from early on, we see that Shin had no sense of familial love; he was born into an environment in which such emotions were discouraged. Individuals were constantly pitted against one another in the camp and family members were no exception, with children being told that they were imprisoned as a result of their parents’ sins. In particular, we see that there was an incessant pressure to snitch. To act as an informer offered the possibility of better treatment or rewards of some kind. There was thus a strong incentive for people to put themselves ahead of others that discouraged any conception of loyalty. And, of course, Shin did not understand loyalty in the first place. 

Unsurprisingly, food was scarce in the camp; so much so that Shin and his classmates ate rodents and insects. This desire for food would come be a pivotal motivation for Shin, as we see in later chapters. As the book specifies, though, food shortages were not confined to the camps, but were a major problem throughout North Korea due to a devastating famine that occurred in the 1990s. Foreign aid had helped to an extent, but many children were malnourished and individuals sought refuge across the Chinese border.

This section of the book goes on to detail the brutality and punishment suffered by schoolchildren in the camp. The children, however, were taught that this punishment was just and fair. To this end, teachers would sometimes order children to gang up and beat other students who had stepped out of line. In line with the camp ethos more generally, they were encouraged to be obedient, pitiless, and disloyal to their peers. Here, we see the indoctrination that occurs in these camps, where students are forbidden from asking questions. The real purpose of these schools is not to educate children; instead, they are trained to work in the mines and fields. 

The third chapter focuses the political background that has shaped North Korea and life within the labor camps. Indeed, the situation outside the camp sometimes made itself apparent within the camp’s confines; this is evident when Shin and his classmates were pelted with rocks by the children of the guards, who regarded the camp prisoners as irredeemable sinners due to their tainted bloodline. This mindset was fostered by a rigid caste system implemented by Kim Il Sung in 1957, and the guards’ children were part of a lineage sanctified by the “Great Leader.” These children were thus conscious of their social position and had no qualms about asserting their superiority.

As this book highlights, there is a striking contrast between North Korea’s supposed allegiance to communist ideals and the reality of its hierarchical society. This society is made up of the main classes: the ‘core class’ live in Pyongyang (the North Korean capital) and hold high-ranking positions, the wavering class includes people such as teacher and technicians, and the lowest class is descended from people who were accused of attacking the government. Such individuals are numerous and work in factories and mines. Accordingly, the children in the camp are primed for such manual labor.

Social status can be malleable to an extent—particularly for the core and wavering classes, who have opportunities to engage in private trading. Accruing wealth or improving one’s social standing is possible for some individuals, but, as this book emphasizes, poverty remains rife in North Korea and bloodline remains a key factor in establishing one’s place in society. The extent of this inequality is highlighted by satellite images revealing the residences of the Kim dynasty: in stark contrast to the rest of the population, North Korea’s rulers live in palatial buildings complete with facilities such as movie theaters, shooting ranges, and basketball courts. 

As the author observes, moreover, even the core class in Pyongyang live modest lives compared with both their rulers and their neighbors south of the border. In addition to Shin’s experiences of the labor camp, other interviewees provide accounts of life in North Korea. One trader revealed that he had partaken in a global insurance fraud, falsifying claims for damages caused by industrial accidents and natural disasters. These schemes were state-run, thus giving the reader an idea of how the Kim family have come to enjoy such a wealthy existence compared with the rest of the country’s population. This same trader cited the gifts that he had received from the government in return, and, as the author also observes, these gifts are telling: blankets, home electronics, and fruit. Such gifts may seem paltry to a Western reader, but this reiterates the fact that even people occupying the upper tiers of North Korean society live modest lives.