
How one man escaped from a North Korean prison camp - rrreese
http://www.utsalumni.org/news/how-one-man-escaped-from-a-north-korean-prison-camp-3549/
======
nlh
What a fascinating and engrossing read. Thanks for sharing.

What I found most remarkable was that despite NK's best efforts at total and
complete isolation of the prisoners -- Shin was born into the camp and knew
nothing of the outside world -- the human soul still inherently wants to be
free. You can "nurture" a miserable existence all you want but it won't keep.

And in the end, what cracked the walls of the prison (metaphorically speaking)
was an outsider with nothing more than stories.

No wonder dictatorships fear things like free speech and dissidents. Even the
slightest hint of a better place (through words alone) can start the chain
reaction.

~~~
politician
The way I read it was that Shin only knew the virtues are betrayal and of
being betrayed until he met the man who nursed him back to health and told him
stories of freedom. Although these stories led him to "wake up", he was still
steeped in the economy of betrayal when he used his naive friend's writhing
body as a staircase to freedom.

I read elsewhere that a post-Juche NK would need one or two generations of
special oversight before full reunification could take place due to the amount
of mental trauma inflicted on the population (of ~20 million).

~~~
charlieok
“special oversight”? What does that mean?

How would such a reunification compare to, say, East and West Germany?

~~~
cynicalkane
East Germany was by far the most advanced and capitalist of the Communist
states, and very close culturally to West Germany, but there is still the
phenomenon of "Ostalgie", from Ost=East + Nostalgie=Nostalgia, yearning for
the good ol' days of Communist suppression.

The movie 'The Lives of Others' was motivated by the filmmakers' desire to
smack down the Ostalgie-types achieving popularity in Germany. It is common
there to see shops selling East German themed stuff, and there is at least one
chain of shops solely dedicated to East German paraphernalia. Polls suggest
there is a real yearning in some areas to go back to the days where the secret
police and rationing of basic goods were real things. It's bizarre.

~~~
Loic
I spent 5 years in a small city in the former East Germany and I am still
spending a lot of time there. The "Ostalgie" is especially the nostalgia of
full employment and social bonding. People basically say, we went from
communism to hard capitalism without the paternalism social democracy West
Germany enjoyed. In 1994, 80% of the jobs in the industry were cut with a few
emblematic cases of West German companies buying back the companies, removing
the hardware, shipping it in China and resuming the production there. It was
not a reunification, it was a take-over without respect for the good things in
the East. For example everything with respect to employment of women,
women/men pay equality, etc. Nowadays, Germany is figuring out that it was not
that bad.

I was not able to find a single person saying, please send back the STASI, it
was better with.

You must only accept that early 2000, the bubble crashed, the complete economy
went out of track and that just 10 years after the reunification. They did not
had the time to taste the good working capitalism.

~~~
meaty
This.

My father lived in various bits of East Germany during the communist era. He
had nothing to say but good things about the situation, until he pissed off a
couple of Stasi in the late 1970s that was and was deported to the West after
a fairly light telling off (fortunately versus locked up). The main thing that
pissed him off about this is that he had just bought a new Robotron TV that he
spent two years saving up for and had to leave it behind. He is bitter about
this to the day :)

If it wasn't for the Stasi, it would have been a modern Utopia. Stable
employment, manufacturing oriented economy (value added everywhere) and could
pretty much stand alone. They even pushed family values and equality for all
over conspicuous consumption, which is pretty much the entire facade of
capitalism these days.

This ALL went down the shitter at reunification.

Perhaps someone should try it again (without the Stasi that is).

Some Ostalgie: I have three bottles of Vita Cola in the cupboard (that stuff
rocks) and a Praktica MTL 5 camera which I use regularly - I find these to be
the essence of the good bits of the GDR :)

~~~
Kynlyn
A Utopia? Perhaps you are setting the Utopian bar a bit too low?

There was very little, if any freedom of expression or freedom of speech. Not
very utopian.

Average citizens had their exposure to the outside world limited. Not very
utopian.

Citizens lived in a very tightly controlled society. A society controlled by
the government and secret police. Not my idea of utopia.

Even if the modern internet had existed then, it's doubtful that a citizen
would even be allowed to come to a site like this and even have this
discussion.

As far as the Stasi go, you can't just say "without them it would have been
fine" because they are completely intertwined with that society. That society
required very little or no dissent to continue and that is why the Stasi
existed: To crush dissent and keep everyone thinking how wonderful their
"utopian" existence was....

~~~
meaty
That almost sounds like our current political state?

~~~
Kynlyn
And how so?

------
sunwooz
My grandfather escaped from North Korea during the 1950s by riding on top of
trains and eventually riding a cargo boat into South Korea. Apparently the
owner of the boat had to throw all the cargo overboard to accomodate everyone.
He took a group of women from his village and escaped with his life, leaving
behind his now-dead family. I am overwhelmed by the fact that if he didn't
escape when he did, I would be in one of the prison camps doing hard labor and
sorting through animal feces for undigested corn. Thanks for linking this
article, now I have renewed my interest in the past and have requested family
in South Korea to send me a copy of our family tree. Grandfather is now gone,
and I wish he lived today, so I could say my thanks and hug him.

~~~
enraged_camel
>>I am overwhelmed by the fact that if he didn't escape when he did, I would
be in one of the prison camps doing hard labor and sorting through animal
feces for undigested corn.

I wish more people had this perspective. Most Westerners I met take what they
have for granted, completely oblivious to what goes on in other parts of the
world.

------
Permit
I can't help but wonder if the world will look back on the situation in North
Korea the same way it does the Rwandan Genocide and the Holocaust. The
conditions in some of these camps are truly disgusting, and a former guard at
one claimed that 1,500 to 2,000 of the workers at his camp were missing
limbs[1].

I don't know what the answer is, but I think hindsight will lead future
generations to condemn perceived inaction on our part.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_22#Conditions_in_the_camp>

~~~
fatbird
In the case of Rwanda, a great deal of the breast-beating that followed had to
do with the fact that Western nations _could_ have done much more to prevent
the genocide than they did (at least on paper). The strategic situation with
North Korea mandates that the only thing to be done to relieve the suffering
of North Koreans would be to restart and win the Korean War. China likes
having North Korea as a buffer state on that border (which is why they
intervened the first time), and at least in decades past, Russia and China had
ideological reasons to prop up the regime.

More immediately, Seoul is within range of the DMZ, and North Korea has 80,000
pieces of artillery aimed directly at it. In the renewal of hostilities, Seoul
would be flattened within hours, and Seoul has 15 million people living in it.
More than Russia and China, that gun pointed at South Korea's head has always
mandated extreme caution when dealing with the North (and allowed the North to
get away with provocations that would have been crazy anywhere else).

~~~
cabalamat
> Seoul is within range of the DMZ, and North Korea has 80,000 pieces of
> artillery aimed directly at it.

Why didn't South Korea start, decades ago, relocating its capital to somewhere
out of artillery fire, i.e. end all development in Seoul and build a new city
in the south. It seems to be a bit thoughtless to build a major city where it
is a hostage to the brutal and aggressive dictatorship next door.

~~~
kibwen
A bit of a tangent here:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington,_D.C._in_the_America...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington,_D.C._in_the_American_Civil_War)

 _Despite being the nation's capital, Washington remained a small city of a
few thousand residents, virtually deserted during the torrid summertime, until
the outbreak of the Civil War._

 _"Of all the detestable places Washington is first. Crowd, heat, bad
quarters, bad fair [fare], bad smells, mosquitos, and a plague of flies
transcending everything within my experience... Beelzebub surely reigns here,
and Willard's Hotel is his temple."_

At the outset the U.S. Civil War, Washington D.C. wasn't just a stinking,
festering, undefended podunk backwater; it was a stinking, festering,
undefended podunk backwater bordered on the south by the most powerful bastion
of Confederate sentiment and on the north by a state experiencing a crisis of
North/South identity. So why didn't Lincoln pack up and move the capital to
Philadelphia or New York? This question isn't rhetorical, I'm genuinely
curious. Was it national pride? Would moving the capital have been viewed as
an act of implicit defeat? Whatever the reason, perhaps the South Koreans felt
the same.

~~~
harlanlewis
This is an interesting question, and one that a few brief minutes searching
the usual sources doesn't turn up an obvious answer (or even much discussion).
Moving the capital doesn't appear to have been seriously considered at the
time.

It _is_ easy to find lots of information on Washington DC's civil war defenses
- some ~70 forts, 400 emplacements for field guns, and unmatched
transportation/communication infrastructure. The resources devoted to
protecting the capital instead of campaigning were a regular source of
contention for Lincoln, his generals, and public opinion - many opportunities
were missed by Army of the Potomac commanders who feared leaving DC
vulnerable.

On the other side, the Confederate capital was originally in Montgomery,
Alabama, and moved to Richmond, Virginia when Virginia seceded following Fort
Sumter. Like Washington, this put the capital remarkably close to the front
lines, but the existing industry, infrastructure, political weight, and
defensibility seemed to make the position worth the risk.

Hoping someone with knowledge chimes in :).

~~~
oh_sigh
The world was bigger and slower back then. If southern troops were mobilized,
there would be days or weeks of warning before they got to DC. By that time,
the politicians could retreat, and replace themselves with union soldiers.

------
ColinWright
This has reminded me to go back and re-read Solzhenitsyn's "One Day in the
Life of Ivan Denisovich"

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Day_in_the_Life_of_Ivan_Den...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Day_in_the_Life_of_Ivan_Denisovich)

[http://www.amazon.co.uk/Life-Denisovich-Penguin-Modern-
Class...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Life-Denisovich-Penguin-Modern-
Classics/dp/0141184744)

<http://www.shmoop.com/ivan-denisovich/>

~~~
onezeno
I'm reading the Gulag Archipelago right now. In it he says that many Russian
authorities were actually relieved when they read Ivan Denisovich, because the
all new of prison camps with conditions far worse than those depicted in the
novel.

~~~
sfont
Indeed the conditions described in the novel were more unpleasant than horrid
(if I remember right). My favorite section though was regarding day light
savings time. Ivan estimates the time based on the position of the sun and is
corrected by one of his fellow inmates that high noon is no longer noon as per
"Soviet Decree."

------
sounds
That this story ever got this much publicity is largely thanks to LiNK
(Liberty in North Korea).

<http://libertyinnorthkorea.org/>

Please consider a small donation of money or even time (the "Get Involved"
menu).

Or even just re-tweet, re-blog, and talk to your friends about this story.

------
unimpressive
This is still one of my favorite stories submitted to HN, even if it is devoid
of technical content. The last time I saw it the new submissions swept it up
like the rising tide.[0]

[0]:<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3716763>

[1]: Going through my list of saved articles shocked me with how many I
remember.

------
markross
I strongly recommend reading the book that this extract was taken from.
<http://amzn.com/0670023329>

~~~
fatbird
I've read the book and it's an amazing read, both for details of what occurs
in the camps, and for the issues Shin faces trying to assimilate in both South
Korea and the U.S. Beyond symptoms much like PTSD, he has perverse
difficulties with money and personal finance. At the same time as he expects
to be cared for in a bare way (because the camp existed to give him a really
shitty place to sleep and really shitty food), he's deeply suspicious of any
largesse shown to him--it's either a bribe requiring action, or an unexpected
windfall that he must consume immediately to avoid it being taken away from
him by a stronger inmate, or the possession of which might be grounds for
further punishment. He has trouble saving money or conceiving of budgeting his
money. He has trouble planning beyond a few days in the future because, in the
camps, nothing was in his control, so planning was not just immaterial, it was
counterproductive and risky.

~~~
cabalamat
When Korea reunifies, the South is going to have to deal with 20 million
people with similar symptoms (in most cases less severe).

~~~
fatbird
Yes, and not just those symptoms, but a generation raised in a truly bizarre
educational system, who believe that total corruption is the norm, and who are
so economically backwards that they'll be largely unable to meaningfully
participate in a re-united economy.

I suspect that, if reunification occurs, NK will be held apart as a special
zone for a generation or two in order to educate a following generation for
real reunification.

~~~
lostlogin
It's been done before. Germany hasn't had a smooth transition, and there are
still problems, but it has been done.

~~~
nandemo
The gap between the Koreas is far bigger than the gap between West and East
Germany ever was. The latter was arguably ahead of the better parts of Third
World (say Brazil or Mexico) in terms of education, health care, infra-
structure, industrialization, etc. Compare to North Korea, which still uses
mainly manual and animal labour for agriculture, and can barely feed its
people.

------
znowi
Well, that was depressing. To tell the truth I couldn't finish reading the
article. It feels so much as a fiction novel that the idea that it chronicles
the actual events is deeply unsettling. How the fuck can this happen in our
time? And how do we stop it?

~~~
enraged_camel
I guess the frustrating part is that we _can't_ stop it without risking the
entire population of Seoul. It just has to change on its own, hopefully over
time.

------
bane
Probably good to point to <http://libertyinnorthkorea.org/>

~~~
montecarl
Thank you for posting this link. I have wanted to help the people of North
Korea for a long time. This was all I needed to prod me into providing some
financial support.

I know that donating some money won't fix everything, but I would have felt
very bad if later in life someone asked me what I had done to help out people
who lived lives like on the one described in the story and my response had
been "nothing".

Everyone who has the ability to read HN is very blessed. It is so easy to
forget how so many of this world's inhabitants are forced to live their daily
lives. Human's don't seem to be very good at empathizing with more than a
small group of people. If we could literally feel the suffering of our
brothers and sister's world wide that live under such oppressive forces, I
believe that the suffering would end swiftly as nobody could resist the call
to arms that would ensue.

~~~
bane
One thing you can be sure of is that integrating North Korean refugees is an
impressively expensive endeavor. From having little to no useful modern
education, to having literally no exchangeable currency.

They need job skills training, housing, clothes, everything. These
organizations can use donations of all sizes, enough to buy socks to enough to
bribe border guards, buy plane tickets or put down a cheonsae [1].

Here's some information on the typical escape path for many of the refugees.
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cVOrUMWaJ0>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chun-say>

------
parenthesis
Shin Dong-hyuk appeared in a Google talk:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ms4NIB6xroc>

------
CapitalistCartr
I think we could liberate North Korea by creating a handheld TV/radio that
received South Korean and Chinese stations and distributing them inside North
Korea. I think the existing regime would change or collapse in a couple of
years. It would cost us a couple billion, but we'd get a better return on that
investment than a lot of our military expenditures.

~~~
guard-of-terra
They have TVs, video tape players, DVD players and smuggle enough South Korean
TV shows and films.

It does help to educate them about the world around them but not much else.

~~~
adrianm
I think you're possibly overestimating the extent foreign media has
proliferated throughout North Korea.

It's true that some families do have televisions; but they're only issued to
the most trusted families as gifts from the State and are tuned to only
government broadcasts which are heavily censored and controlled.

Regarding increased smuggling from China, you really cannot extrapolate
widespread proliferation from the western press published regarding the
crackdowns on the smuggling by the government.

Punishment for possessing smuggled devices is so draconian that most people
privileged enough to live in Pyongyang (only ~10% of the population) wouldn't
risk their lives or that of their families. Electricity is also tenuous in
Pyongyang so I think it's reasonable to assume that the situation is orders of
magnitude worse throughout the rest of the country where the government
invests much less in infrastructure.

~~~
guard-of-terra
As far as I understand you can buy an used chinese TV set or DVD player. It's
legal. It costs thru the nose, but if the family has means of income (the most
common way is small business/trading on the market) it can be done. People are
also very social so they manage to catch a glimpse.

The punishment may be draconian but I guess you can reliably evade it by the
means of a small bribe.

Pyongyang is kind of special but also nothern regions usually have some
niceties due to their proximity to Chinese border (and therefore
trade/smuggled goods).

I'm basically parrotting a blogger that writes a lot about both Koreas so I
might be not entirely accurate. <http://tttkkk.lj.ru/>

~~~
FrojoS
Thanks for the "translation" then! Wouldn't mind to read more.

~~~
guard-of-terra
He writes for Western media occassionally:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Lankov> Look up the articles from the
"external links" section, a lot of interesting stuff there. Googling might
help too.

------
deliminator
Another story about life in prison and subsequent escape
[http://www.dailynk.com/english/sub_list_last.php?page=1&...](http://www.dailynk.com/english/sub_list_last.php?page=1&cataId=nk02800)

------
damian2000
This is not the same story, but this book is worth reading...

The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag [by Chol-hwan
Kang]

[http://www.amazon.com/Aquariums-Pyongyang-Years-North-
Korean...](http://www.amazon.com/Aquariums-Pyongyang-Years-North-
Korean/dp/0465011047/)

Author was nine years old when imprisoned at the Yodok camp in 1977.
Inexplicably released in 1987, he states that the only lesson his imprisonment
had "pounded into me was about man's limitless capacity to be vicious."

------
mbubb
hacker news - this really bums me out. Last week HN was rightly all over
Atlantic for shilling for Scientology.

This article is written by the unification church - right up in the same bat
shit crazy neighborhood as LR Hubbard and his pals...

And the discussion - Korea is crazy and belligerent?

The country known as the hermit kingdom. Did not open to the west until ~
1870s. The last time it was involved in trying to invade another country was
as a vassal state of Kublai Khan. And yet such assertions go unchecked.

Korea is not belligerent and has much riding upon regional stability. We are
talking about an economy that is roughly the scale of Italy's and a standard
of living that is in many ways better than the US.

The biggest impediment to North South reunification is the immense disparity.
The difference between East and West Germany was minute in comparison.

I am not Korean but love Korea. Have had the chance to work there (3 yrs) and
know a slight bit of the history, language and culture.

There are many better sources of information on North Korea - don't give the
Unification Church any more publicity. The Netflix documentary mentioned is a
good one.

And stop with the misinformed ideas of Korea. It is not like China and Japan
even though it is stuck in the middle. Korean language and culture compared to
Chinese is roughly analogous to English with Latin. The base is completely
different but Koreans borrowed Chinese philosophy and science.

Linguistically Korean has more in common with Mongolian and Hungarian than it
does to Mandarin.

~~~
Volpe
Umm it's a book, and the piece was written by The Guardian... So not sure what
you are talking about...

Also, there are 2 Koreas, you talk as if there is only 1. No one is suggesting
that South Korea is crazy or belligerent. I didn't even see that assertion
with North korea... What are you referring to?

Also I'm quite sure the standard of living is not better in North Korea (than
in the US), or are you referring to the south? if so, why?

~~~
mbubb
Obviously I don't mean both Koreas - North Korea is significantly worse than
Haiti. And yes more than one commenter referred to Koreans as being warlike
(speeder, etc).

And the piece is cited in the Unification Church alumni website - not the
Guardian, so i do not know what you are talking about.

Reread this whole discussion and tell me that is is an accurate portrayal of
Korea or the current state of relation s. It is not.

There are a few intelligent comments about East Germany but then a bunch of
drivel about North Korea as a buffer for China against an imperialistic Korea.

There is not really one comment to attack here for factual wrongheadedness.
Start from a Unification church review and spirals off from there. The
discussion is completely off the rails.

~~~
evan_
It's clearly labeled as being reposted from The Guardian. Here's the page it
used to occupy on the Guardian's
website:[http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/mar/16/escape-north-
kor...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/mar/16/escape-north-korea-prison-
camp)

The content is unfortunately no longer available, but a quick Google search
reveals several places in addition to the OP's link you can find this text. I
don't have time to do so but you should definitely review the text posted by
the OP against other sources printing the same text, or even from the book
itself.

------
petercooper
If this sort of stuff intrigues you, as it does me, check out "Gulag" by Anne
Applebaum. I listened to it in audiobook form (27 hours!) and it was both
fascinating and devastating to hear how the Soviets imprisoned, tortured, and,
frequently, killed millions in such encampments.

------
grahammather
This made me physically sick to read. The sheer scale of this tragedy and the
utter depravity of nearly everyone involved makes me weep for humanity. I lost
sleep last night as this story haunted me, reminding me that this evil is
happening right now, still, to hundreds of thousands more like Shin.

Eric Schmidt owes this man a visit (if he hasn't already). If he can fly
halfway around the world to pay his respects to the architects of this
abomination, buttressing their hateful regime, then he can use his powers of
publicity to call attention to the plight of those like Shin.

------
shaggyfrog
CBS/60 Minutes interviewed him; it was on TV a few weeks ago:
<http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=50136263n>

------
warmwaffles
Truely amazing story. I can not fathom the pain and suffering this man had to
endure. It's odd that I was getting angry that he betrayed so many people, and
betrayed one man that was trying to escape with him. But, in that situation,
it really is a dog eat dog world and I'm sure Park would not have hesitated to
leave Shin behind. Crazy article, makes you really wonder if NK will ever be
able to rejoin SK or what will happen to the nation entirely

------
ttar
Wait, in the middle of the story Shin was to be executed, then wasn't? What
happened there?

~~~
MBCook
I found that kind of confusing as well.

I believe it was his brother and his mother who were executed. I believe his
brother was named Shin as well, with the rest of his name different.

I think this is a family name / given name issue.

~~~
onethree
Korean names are in the order Family Name then First name. They refer to him
by his family name, so its easy to confuse him, his brother, and his father

------
Aissen
The original story, from 2007:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/09/world/asia/09iht-
korea.4.6...](http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/09/world/asia/09iht-
korea.4.6569853.html?pagewanted=all)

I still remember it vividly from that day.

------
mr_luc
"Citizen of the Galaxy," by Robert Heinlein, jumped to mind when I read this
story.

The protagonist, Thorby, is a freed slave, and most of the people he
encounters in the story are skeptical that slavery still exists.

------
selvan
There is a say in my language "Birds born in a cage too have wings". Sometimes
its hard for me to digest how a society that has 99% literacy rate, could
continue living like this, under NK regime.

------
james4k
There is a documentary on this: <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2149190/>

Have not seen it yet, but I saw the cover browsing around on Netflix.

------
davidroberts
Looks like I'm not the only UTS alumni who reads Hacker News...

~~~
kareemm
Grin, me neither.

------
stretchwithme
It's Anthem all over again, times a thousand.

------
notdrunkatall
That these camps exist today is a giant pockmark on all of humanity.

