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Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West
Blaine Harden
2012, 205 pages
Nonfiction
Escape from Camp 14 is a gripping story about, Shin Dong-hyuk, one of the only people to be born/raised in a North Korean prison camp, to escape. Not for the faint-of-heart, the portrait painted of North Korean prison camps is on par with Soviet Era Gulags and Nazi concentration camps.
Shin Dong-hyuk was born as a product of a “reward marriage,” an arranged marriage between two prisoners as a reward for good behavior. His harrowing experience gives the reader a chilling look into the horrors of North Korea and its prisons, detailing a childhood filled with beatings, torture, and near starvation. Familial love or loyalties were completely absent.
Escape from Camp 14 also illuminates the long-standing North Korean Policy on multigenerational punishment, which immediately scatters any confusion as to why the political/prison system has survived for so long. If you committed a crime in North Korea, not only would you be imprisoned and/or executed but three entire generations of your family would be imprisoned too. Shin’s father was at Camp 14 because some of his brothers defected to South Korea. This insidious policy was created to purge, what the leadership felt, were bad blood lines from Korean society. It also made any resistance nearly impossible. After all, how many people would be willing to sacrifice their entire family?
