Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West by Blaine Harden

Author:Blaine Harden [Harden, Blaine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101561263
Publisher: Viking
Published: 2012-03-28T16:00:00+00:00

It is still the only song Shin knows.

____

In November, not long after Park was assigned to the textile factory, four Bowiwon guards paid a surprise visit to the prisoners’ nightly meeting of self-criticism. Two of them were unfamiliar faces, and Shin believed they were from outside the camp.

As the meeting ended, the chief guard said he wanted to talk about lice, a chronic problem in the camps. He asked prisoners to step forward if they were infested.

A man and a woman who were leaders in their respective dormitory rooms stood. They said lice were out of control in their quarters. Guards gave each of them a bucket filled with a cloudy liquid that smelled, to Shin, like agricultural chemicals.

To demonstrate its effectiveness in controlling lice, guards asked five men and five women in each of the infested dorm rooms to wash themselves with the cloudy liquid. Shin and Park, of course, had lice, but they were not given an opportunity to use the treatment.

In about a week, all ten prisoners who had been washing with the liquid developed boils on their skin. After several weeks, their skin began to putrefy and flake off. They had high fevers that kept them from working. Shin saw a truck arrive at the factory and watched as the ailing prisoners were loaded into it. He never saw them again.

It was then, in mid-December 2004, that Shin decided he had had enough. He began thinking about escape.

Park made those thoughts possible. He changed the way Shin connected with other people. Their friendship broke a lifelong pattern—stretching back to Shin’s malignant relationship with his mother—of wariness and betrayal.

Shin was no longer a creature of his captors. He believed he had found someone to help him survive.

Their relationship echoed, in many ways, the bonds of trust and mutual protection that kept prisoners alive and sane in Nazi concentration camps. In those camps, researchers found, the “basic unit of survival” was the pair, not the individual.

“[I]t was in the pairs that the prisoners kept alive the semblance of humanity,” concluded Elmer Luchterhand, a sociologist at Yale who interviewed fifty-two concentration camp survivors shortly after liberation.1

Pairs stole food and clothing for each other, exchanged small gifts, and planned for the future. If one member of a pair fainted from hunger in front of an SS officer, the other would prop him up.

“Survival … could only be a social achievement, not an individual accident,” wrote Eugene Weinstock, a Belgian resistance fighter and Hungarian-born Jew who was sent to Buchenwald in 1943.2

The death of one member of a pair often doomed the other. Women who knew Anne Frank in the Bergen-Belsen camp said that neither hunger nor typhus killed the young girl who would become the most famous diarist of the Nazi era. Rather, they said, she lost the will to live after the death of her sister, Margot.3

Like Nazi concentration camps, labor camps in North Korea use confinement, hunger, and fear to create a kind of Skinner box, a closed, closely regulated chamber in which guards assert absolute control over prisoners.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.