Korean Job Discussion Forums

[fermentation]

I was listening to tbs on the radio and they interviewed Blaine Harden, the author of Escape from Camp 14 that details the life of 신동혁. Shin is the first person born in a North Korean gulag to have escaped and defected to the west. Harden basically talks about Shin's life in the gulags and there's some remarkable and messed up stuff.

Shin was born out of a "reward marriage" where they let good behaving inmates have a relationship with eachother.

Shin had to compete with this mother for food and stole his mother's food and got beaten by it from her. He was so hungry he didn't care about the beatings.

His first memory is an execution of a prisoner when he was 4 years old.

He was basically raised by the guards and indoctrinated with their ideals.

He snitched on his mother and brother when he overheard them talking about escape. They arrested him and tortured him but let him go after Shin convinced the guards that he's a good boy. Then he witnessed them kill his mother and brother. But because of his indoctrination, he didn't feel guilty about their deaths until after he defected.

He had very little knowledge of outside world before he met new prisoner who told him about it. Didn't know Pyongyang is the capital of his country. Didn't know you could eat meat in China. Didn't know the world is round.

It's some crazy stuff.

[CentralCali]

Just so you know, the subject lines for the threads won't display in 한글.

[fermentation]

[Pablo]

There was a New York Times article about this earlier in the month that says the original memoir is "a gigantic lie". The article is here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/12/books/escape-from-camp-14-by-blaine-harden.html?

[Yaya]

Pablo, you misread the article. His story is not one big lie, but he did tell one big lie about snitching on his mother and brother.

[fermentation]

Yeah he seems to have lied about how nice of a person he actually is.

[falco]

Bought the book a couple of weeks ago when I was in Japan. Great read, really engrossing. The brutality described is almost beyond belief at times. Almost unbelievable he made it out alive.

[The Sultan of Seoul]