Living in the shadow of his shackles

By Blaine Harden

Dec. 28, 2008 12 AM PT

Harden writes for the Washington Post.

SEOUL — In Camp No. 14, the North Korean political prison where Shin Dong-hyuk was born and where he says he saw his mother hanged, inmates never saw a picture of Kim Jong Il.

“I had no idea who he is,” Shin said, referring to the leader whose photograph is displayed nearly everywhere else in North Korea.

Inmates did not need to know the face of their “Dear Leader,” as Kim is called. Behind electrified fences, they tended pigs, tanned leather, collected firewood and labored in mines until they died or were executed.

The exception is Shin, who is 26 and lives in a small rented room here in Seoul. He is a thin, short, shy man with quick, wary eyes, a baby face and sinewy arms bowed from childhood labor. There are burn scars on his back and left arm from where he was tortured by fire at age 14, when he was unable to explain why his soon-to-be-hanged mother had tried to escape. The middle finger of his right hand is cut off at the first knuckle, punishment for accidentally dropping a sewing machine in the garment factory at his camp.

There are 14,431 North Korean defectors living in South Korea, according to the latest government count. Shin is the only one known to have escaped to the South from a prison camp in the North.

Shin’s story could not be independently verified, but it has been vetted and vouched for by leading human rights activists and members of defector organizations in Seoul. They came to know Shin when he arrived in South Korea in 2005 and was hospitalized with post-traumatic stress disorder.

“At first I could not believe him because no one ever succeeded in the escape,” said Kim Tae-jin, president of the Democracy Network Against North Korean Gulag and a defector from North Korea who spent a decade in another concentration camp there. The No. 15 camp where Kim was held -- unlike Shin’s No. 14 -- sometimes released political prisoners, as it did Kim, if they were “fully revolutionized.”

“I saw too many prisoners executed before my eyes for attempting to escape,” Kim said. “No one made it out, except for Shin.”

The U.S. government and human rights groups estimate that 150,000 to 200,000 people are in the North’s prison camps. Though many of the camps can be seen in satellite images, North Korea denies their existence.

In recent weeks, Shin has been watching old films of the Allied liberation of Nazi concentration camps, which include scenes of bulldozers unearthing corpses that Adolf Hitler’s collapsing Third Reich had tried to hide.

“It is just a matter of time before Kim Jong Il thinks of this,” Shin said in an interview. “I hope that the United States, through pressure and persuasion, can convince Kim not to murder all those people in the camps.”

Shin is the author of a grimly extraordinary book, “Escape to the Outside World.”

It is illustrated with simple line drawings of his mother’s hanging, the amputation of his finger, his torture by fire. There are black-and-white photos of his scars, as well as drawings and a satellite photo of Camp No. 14, which is in Kaechon, about 55 miles north of Pyongyang, the capital.

The book grew out of a diary Shin kept in a Seoul hospital while he was recovering from the nightmares and screaming bouts that were part of his adjustment.

It begins with the story of his birth in Camp No. 14 to parents whose union was arranged by guards. As a reward for excellent work as a mechanic, his father was given the woman who would become Shin’s mother. Shin lived with her until he was 12, when he sent to work with other children.

In the book, Shin describes the “common and almost routine” savagery of the camp: the rape of his cousin by prison guards and the beating to death of a young girl who was found with five grains of unauthorized wheat in her pocket. He once found three kernels of corn in a pile of cow dung, he writes. He picked them out, cleaned them off on his sleeve and ate them. “As miserable as it may seem, that was my lucky day,” he writes.

Living in capitalist South Korea not made Shin a celebrity or afforded him much of a living. “Escape to the Outside World” has sold about 500 copies from its single Korean-language printing of 3,000. No edition in English is being undertaken, he said.

He is unemployed and worries about how to pay his $300-a-month rent. His defector stipend of $800 a month, which he had received from the South Korean government since arriving in Seoul 2 1/2 years ago, ended in August.

Making money. Saving money. Dating. Loving another human being. These are all strange concepts that Shin has struggled -- and largely failed -- to understand.

“I never heard the word ‘love’ in the camp,” he said. “I want to have a girlfriend, but I don’t know how to get one. Two months ago, I found myself without any money. It suddenly occurred to me that I had to go out and support myself.”

Shin also struggles to grasp how prosperous Koreans in the South can be so unmoved by the suffering of tens of thousands of fellow Koreans living in torment in prison.

“I don’t want to be critical of this country, but I would say that out of the total population of South Korea, only .001% has any real understanding of or interest in North Korea,” Shin said. “Only a few decades ago, the South Koreans had their own human rights issues. But rapid growth and prosperity has made them forget.”

Shin may overstate the South’s lack of concern about human rights in the North, but he has a point.

When South Korean President Lee Myung-bak was elected last year, only 3% of voters named North Korea as a primary concern. They were overwhelmingly interested in economic growth and higher salaries.

South Koreans want reunification with the North, but not right away, polls show. They have seen the cost and messiness of German reunification. They worry about political collapse in the impoverished North and are afraid that dealing with it would lower their living standards, according to government officials and independent analysts.

For most of the last decade, South Korea’s official “sunshine policy” toward the North was all but silent on human rights issues. Seoul gave Kim’s government large annual gifts of fertilizer and made major economic investments -- with few strings attached.

Lee’s government, which took power in February, has taken a harder line with North Korea, but a substantial portion of the public remains reluctant to condition assistance on issues such as prison camps, slave labor and torture.

Shin does not want vengeance. He’ll settle for awareness.

“Kim Jong Il is a gangster,” he said. “If we kill him, we will be just like him.”

Instead, Shin wants South Koreans and the rest of the world to pay closer attention to what is happening to people still in those camps.

To that end, he tells his awful story -- to anyone in South Korea who will listen, to human rights groups in Japan and, earlier this year, on a college tour of the United States.

In 1996, Shin was forced to watch the execution of his mother, who was hanged on the same day that his only brother was shot to death. Before that, his torturers told him, for the first time, why he and his family were in the camp. Two of his father’s brothers had collaborated with South Korea during the Korean War and then fled to the South, the guards told him. His father was guilty because he was the brother of traitors. Shin was guilty because he was his father’s son.

Nine years later, Shin escaped. He was working in the camp’s garment factory with an older prisoner who had seen the outside world and wanted to see it again. When they were collecting wood in a mountainous corner of the camp on Jan. 2, 2005, the two ran to an electrified barbed-wire fence. His friend got hung up and died in the fence; Shin stepped on his body and got through.

“I could afford little thought for my poor friend and I was just overwhelmed by joy,” he writes of his first moments beyond the fence.

He broke into a nearby house, where he stole clothes and rice. He sold some of the rice for cash and made his way north to the border with China. There, he bribed guards with cigarettes and ran across the frozen Tumen River. Shin says he is still amazed that he got out.

“I think God was helping me,” he said.

Here in South Korea, Shin sometimes goes to church on Sundays. “I go to the church, but I don’t really understand the words or the concepts,” he said.

Shin could not find his uncles in South Korea. He searched for them for a while, then gave up. He no longer has nightmares and sleeps soundly through the night. There is, however, a new kind of misery.

“I have recently discovered that I am lonely,” he said.

In the prison camp, he and everyone else ignored his birthday. But now when his birthday rolls around, he aches inside.

“I realize you really need a family,” he said.

Shin’s birthday was Nov. 19, and four friends threw him a surprise party at a T.G.I. Friday’s in Seoul. It was his first birthday party.

“I was very moved,” he said.

Special correspondent Stella Kim contributed to this report.