Via AnCaps: Escape From a North Korean Prison

Subject: Via AnCaps: Escape From a North Korean Prison Mon Mar 26, 2012 3:28 am

Born in a forced labor camp, he knew nothing of the outside world. Then he breached the barbed wire

Via AnCaps: Escape From a North Korean Prison Obsi713koread2012032315

On Jan. 2, 2005, 23-year-old Shin Dong-hyuk squirmed through an electric fence and escaped from Camp 14, a political prison camp in North Korea. Between 150,000 and 200,000 people are estimated to be held in the country's political camps, and Mr. Shin is the only person known to have been born in a camp who has made his way to the West. (His father, Mr. Shin eventually learned, was a prisoner because two of his brothers had defected to the south during the Korean War. Mr. Shin's crime was being his father's son.) In this excerpt from "Escape From Camp 14," Blaine Harden details his unlikely escape.

In 1998, when Shin turned 16, he became an adult worker. His years of schooling to that point had only served as training for hard labor.

Many of his classmates were assigned to coal mines, where accidental death from cave-ins, explosions and gas poisonings was common. Shin was lucky—he was assigned to a pig farm, where 200 men and women raised about 800 pigs, along with goats, rabbits, chickens and a few cows. As a prisoner, Shin was not allowed to eat the meat of any livestock on the farm. But he and other prisoners could sometimes steal. The smell of roasting pork on the farm would alert guards, leading to beatings and weeks of half-rations, so they ate purloined pork raw.

In March 2003, Shin was transferred to the camp's garment factory, a crowded, chaotic, stressful work site where 2,000 women and 500 men made military uniforms. Meals were skimpy, hours were endless, and Shin was always hungry. There was pressure to snitch on fellow prisoners.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304724404577295463062461978.html?mod=WSJ_hp_us_mostpop_read

Via AnCaps: Escape From a North Korean Prison

Via AnCaps: Escape From a North Korean Prison

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