Book Review: Escape From Camp 14 by Blaine Harden

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I first heard of Blaine Harden's book, Escape From Camp 14, in the Writer's Remarks at the end of Steve Berry's The Patriot Threat.  The backstory of one of the characters in the book is based on Harden's account. That character was one of the most compelling in Berry's novel, a tragic heroine fighting internal demons created by her past as an inmate of North Korea's horrific prison camps.

The camps are horrific but only became notorious with the publication of Harden's book. (Notorious - adjective - famous or well known, typically for some bad quality or deed.) I had not heard of them, though I was not surprised they existed. But the outright horror of these camps is something that remained below the radar for most people.

The book is the story of the life of Shin Dong-hyuk, the only person known to have escaped from one of the camps. The camps are large; Camp 14 covers about 60 square miles. It is a small city of political prisoners and guards completely surrounded by a lethal electric fence. In the camp, prisoners are slaves, forced to labour in factories making military uniforms, on farms and in coal mines.

Shin Dong-hyuk was born in the camp to political prisoner parents and indoctrinated into a life of complete servitude from his birth. At school the teachers had absolute power. He witnessed an irate teacher beat a student to death with a pointer. She was beaten for hoarding five kernels of corn.

Executions are common. He witnessed his first as a child of four. Several thousand prisoners had been herded together to witness the execution and he crawled between legs to get up front. He had no idea what to expect and was excited by the crowd but was frightened by the loud report when the guns went off. It was the first of many executions he would witness.

The camps operate under ten rules for prisoners. They are called the ten commandments.

1. Do not try to escape
2. No more than two prisoners can meet together
3. Do not steal
4. Guards must be obeyed unconditionally
5. Anyone who sees a fugitive or suspicious figure must promptly report him
6. Prisoners must watch one another and report any suspicious behaviour immediately 
7. Prisoners must more than fulfill the work assigned to them each day
8. Beyond the workplace, there must be no intermingling of the sexes for personal reasons
9. Prisoners must genuinely repent of their errors
10. Prisoners who violate the laws and regulations of the camp will be shot immediately

Any transgression could be punished by death, no questions asked. 

Young people were in the camps largely because when an adult was interned as an enemy of the state, his entire family was imprisoned as well. Occasionally people are permitted to marry as a reward for good behaviour. But they live apart and are only allowed to visit a few times a year. Shin was the product of such a union. He was raised by his mother and rarely saw his father.

Food is scarce in the camps and competition for meager rations is fierce. He hated his mother. He blamed her for his life and saw her as competition for food. She, in turn, beat him frequently. 

At age thirteen he was taken from his school by three uniformed men and imprisoned in an underground dungeon. They informed him that his mother and brother had been caught trying to escape. What did he know about their plans? He was tortured, his ankles shackled and hung upside down from the ceiling. Later he was stripped and trussed up by his hands and feet. Slowly he was lowered over a bed of sizzling coals until his flesh was scorched.

He was thrown into another cell with an older prisoner who ministered to his wounds and who he came to call Uncle. It was the first person he met who showed him genuine kindness. Uncle told him about the outside world, the first time he learned that his life was not the only way to live. That there was a better world outside the camp. 

After almost seven months without seeing sunlight, he was brought to the room where he had first been interrogated. To his surprise, his father was there. It was clear the old man had also been tortured. Both had their heads covered by bags and put in a car and driven away. They were taken out at the execution ground and the sacks removed. There were two stakes in the ground. One had a rope and a noose attached to the top with a crate standing in front of it. Shin thought he and his father were to be executed but they were, in fact, there as witnesses.

His mother and brother were brought out. His mother was placed on the crate with the noose around her neck. The brother was tied to the other stake. The crate was kicked away and she strangled to death. Shin avoided her eyes. Then three riflemen shot his brother. "Bullets snapped the rope that held his forehead to the pole. It was a bloody, brain-splattered mess of a killing, a spectacle that sickened and frightened Shin. But he thought his brother, too, had deserved it." (emphasis added)

That is the real horror of the prison camps. The inmates are stripped of all human dignity and all human feeling. A boy of thirteen could watch his mother and brother brutally murdered and, because of his indoctrination, believe they deserved it. For what? For the crime of wanting to be escape.

In fact, prisoners are taught to distrust each other and to snitch on others. Shin became a master snitch. Snitching was rewarded by the teachers and the guards. After he escaped and his story got out, he had hard time adjusting. But he agreed to let Harden tell it. It was published in 2012 and became a best seller as Shin was recruited to work for organizations fighting for human rights in North Korea. 

In 2015, much to the chagrin of Harden and others, Shin changed his story. The North Korean propaganda machine had a field day with headlines like "Scumbag Shin Finally Exposed!" But as Harden explains in this revised second edition of the book, "the story Shin now tells is considerably more complex - and in some ways more disturbing."

In the original version he did not reveal that he, in fact, was responsible for his mother's and brother's execution. He had overheard them planning to escape and had snitched on them to curry favour. He hated his mother and he was glad to see her murdered by the state. 

He had confided to a schoolmate about his mother's plans seeking advice on what to do. They agreed he should tell someone in authority. It was late and his teacher was not at the school so he told a night guard. He was imprisoned because the guard took credit for snitching when he told his superiors. Although he told his torturers that it was he who had informed the night guard, they didn't believe him and thought he knew more than he was telling, so he was tortured. Eventually they checked with Shin's schoolmate who confirmed the story. The night guard mysteriously disappeared.

After a few years in the west and recurring nightmares in which he relived those executions, he  felt the need to come clean. The story becomes even more harrowing as a result. The distrust, spitefulness, and pettiness of prison life is brought to the fore. Harden interviewed experts in the psychology of prisoners and terror victims.

In fact, the coldness and lack of humanity in the camps is a central theme of the book. In speeches to human rights groups, Shin tells them he was an animal and is now still learning to be human.

Ten years after his mother's execution, now a young man, Shin met a man named Park, a newly interned prisoner who had been one of the elite and knew much about the outside world. He was assigned to Shin because Shin was a reliable snitch. Park's descriptions of life outside North Korea spurred his imagination. Park and Shin struck up a fast friendship and he decided not to rat out his friend. In fact, he and Park plotted to escape the camp together. The actual escape and his subsequent struggle for survival in China and his eventual escape to South Korea is a crucial part of the story. Park, sadly, did not make it, but he enabled Shin to get through the electric fence.

He spent over  year in China, working odd jobs and avoiding the police who might send him back. Eventually he made his way to South Korea.

It had been a long, hard struggle adjusting to freedom. Plagued by demons, he often resisted attempts to help him. His presentations on behalf of civil rights groups were often incoherent and ill thought out. But the book ends on a triumphant note. 

Shin had moved to Seattle where Harden also lived and invited him to attend a presentation to a church group. He had found his voice and spoke without notes. "Shin introduced himself as a predator who had been bred in the camp to inform on family and friends - and to feel no remorse. 'The only thing I thought was that I had to prey on others for my survival,' he said.

"In the camp, when his teacher beat a six-year-old classmate to death for having five grains of corn in her pocket, Shin confessed to the congregation that he 'didn't think much about it.'

"'I did not know about sympathy or sadness,' he said. 'They educated us from birth so that we were not capable of normal human emotions. Now that I am out, I am learning to be emotional. I have learned to cry. I feel like I am becoming human.'"

Harden goes far beyond Shin's story, providing a great deal of background on the politics of North Korea, how it evolved from a socialist state to a neo-feudalistic dictatorship, one in which a privileged elite lives in Pyongyang, a city closed to everyone else. The vast majority are peasants. And there is a substantial third caste - the political prisoners who inhabit the gulags. The Kim dynasty is unparalleled in its obsessive cultishness.

In a preview at the end of the book of another book by Harden, The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot, about the "birth of  tyranny in North Korea", Harden notes that a year after seizing power, the Great Leader, as Kim Il-sung was known, decided to characterize himself as "the sun of mankind and the greatest man who ever appeared in the world". 

One of the interesting stories is about the organic nature of capitalism. It is not merely an economic system but something that emerges naturally if not suppressed. In the 1990s, the crumbling North Korean economy was unable to feed its people. Famine was common, and to fill the void left by the states's incompetence, a burgeoning capitalism evolved. Private traders and farmers managed to stave off complete starvation. 

When the crisis was over, the North Korean government was forced by circumstance to continue to let private traders provide the bulk of Korea's food. Nevertheless, it is officially forbidden. There is a great deal of bribery as government officials, police and military, for all their privilege, are still extremely poor. It is relatively easy to get officials to look the other way. This private sector helped Shin in his escape. 

Another interesting backgrounder is on South Korea's uneasy relationship with the North. The South hates war. They value peace. Its society is hyper-capitalistic and competitive. The contrast between the two is astounding. "South Korea's economy is 38 times larger than the North's; its international trade volume is 224 times larger."

South Korea offers instant citizenship to Northern refugees, as well as providing substantial aid in adjusting to the massive change that the South represents. It is not always easy for refugees to adjust. Shin himself is still learning to find his way. 

When Shin finally made it to South Korea, the Seoul-based Database Center for North Korean Human Rights published his story as Escape to the Outside World. The book flopped. Only 500 copies of the 3000 press run sold. While official South Korea helps refugees, the people offer a big ho-hum. They do not want to get involved. 

More than anything, the South is pacifist and wants to avoid war. Even though the North periodically launches an attack on the South, sending an assassination squad one time to kill the President, sinking a South Korean warship another time killing 46 sailors, bombarding a small South Korean island killing four, and even the downing of a Korean Air passenger jet, the South does not retaliate. 

As Shin puts it, "Their ways of living do not allow them to think about things beyond their borders. There is nothing in it for them."

A businessman Harden talked to told him, "There is no winner if war breaks out, hot or cold. Our nation is richer and smarter than North Korea. We have to use reason over confrontation." 

The South is also leery of the price tag of reunification. They are aware that the costs of absorbing North Korea would be two and half times the cost West Germany faced with unification. Two trillion dollars for thirty years, higher taxes for six decades and ten per cent of the South's GDP going to aid the North. 

This sanguine attitude has led to an uneasy peace but spared the country from total war. It is perhaps, something the United States can learn from. Help the refugees from tyranny and terrorism, but avoid war. 

Escape from Camp 14 is a dynamic and thrilling read, and a must read for anyone trying to understand North Korea and its culture. A must read for anyone wanting to understand the true nature of totalitarianism in practice.

Related Column

• Book Review: The Patriot Threat by Steve Berry

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