When Blaine Harden wrote his shocking 2008 profile of Shin Dong-hyuk for The Washington Post, Mr. Shin was living in Seoul, South Korea, and already a published author. He had written “Escape to the Outside World,” a 2007 Korean-language account of his horrific upbringing.
ESCAPE FROM CAMP 14
One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey From North Korea to Freedom in the West
By Blaine Harden
Illustrated. 205 pages. Viking. $26.95.
Related
Times Topic: North Korea
Mr. Shin was born in a North Korean forced-labor camp and then found his way to freedom. There were some problems with playing back this account verbatim. So Mr. Harden’s dramatic front-page article, “North Korean Prison Camp Escapee Tells of Horrors, Worries About Those Left Behind,” took care to include a disclaimer: “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,” The Post article said.
Unfortunately, the disclaimer turned out to be necessary. As Mr. Harden now acknowledges in “Escape From Camp 14,” his blunt, best-selling book about Mr. Shin’s life, Mr. Shin had built his own memoir upon a gigantic lie.
In his account Mr. Shin claimed to have been a helpless innocent witness to the execution of his mother and brother when Mr. Shin was only 14. He had indeed been helpless, and he had the torture marks to prove it.
But, as Mr. Harden discovered about a year into the interviewing process for this book, Mr. Shin’s original account omitted a crucial detail: He was responsible for the executions. He had snitched to a prison guard about an escape his mother and brother were planning, knowing full well that escape plans were punishable by death.
Mr. Shin admitted to Mr. Harden that he had made this trade-off to get more food and an easier job at school. And he said he had done it without regrets. He thought that his mother and brother deserved to die.
“In writing this book, I have sometimes struggled to trust him,” Mr. Harden writes understandably in “Escape From Camp 14.” Mr. Harden tries to fathom a cryptic, troubled and not entirely sympathetic young man whose circumstances lend themselves to exaggeration.
What’s more, the new book uses dialogue borrowed from Mr. Shin’s disingenuous 2007 version. “Escape From Camp 14” also includes simple line drawings (as Mr. Shin’s book had) that give the most traumatic parts of his story — torture, imprisonment, maiming, executions — the look of action comics. The most benign of these pictures carries this caption: “Children in the camps scavenged constantly for food, eating rats, insects and undigested kernels of corn they found in cow dung.”
Readers may well be won over by the sharp, declarative, young-adult style of Mr. Harden’s adventure writing. They will respond to urgent concern about conditions in North Korean prison camps, which are now visible via satellite photographs. And most misgivings about “Escape From Camp 14” will be outweighed by the power of a fast, brutal read.
This is not a familiar prison camp story; as Mr. Harden points out, Shin Dong-hyuk is not Elie Wiesel. “God did not disappear or die,” Mr. Harden writes. “Shin had never heard of him.”
Mr. Shin did not spend his imprisonment missing love, joy, civilization or comfort, because he had never experienced such things. As the spawn of a “reward marriage” — considered “the ultimate bonus for hard work and reliable snitching” — he had no real family ties.
The book says that he regarded his mother as a rival for food and was right to do so; she once beat him with a hoe for eating her lunch. As a young child, he saw schoolmates maimed or even killed for minor transgressions and he learned to obey the camp’s totalitarian rules.
Much of this book’s impact comes from its nonstop parade of ghastly details. Mr. Harden writes of how prisoners harvested frozen human excrement — chipped from toilets — to make up for North Korea’s shortage of other fertilizer; how eating rats could help stave off pellagra; how a former North Korean Army officer in another camp, despairing, jumped down a coal mine shaft, hoping to die.
But “Shin’s misery never skidded into complete hopelessness,” Mr. Harden writes in typically plain, forthright style. “He had no hope to lose, no past to mourn, no pride to defend. He did not find it degrading to lick soup off the floor. He was not ashamed to beg a guard for forgiveness. It didn’t trouble his conscience to betray a friend for food. These were merely survival skills, not motives for suicide.”
ESCAPE FROM CAMP 14
One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey From North Korea to Freedom in the West
By Blaine Harden
Illustrated. 205 pages. Viking. $26.95.
Related
Times Topic: North Korea
Not even the peremptory chopping off of part of Mr. Shin’s middle finger — an event that warrants only two paragraphs in Mr. Harden’s parade of horrors — was enough to set Mr. Shin’s escape plans in motion. What did it was the arrival of a worldly prisoner who made him realize what he was missing.
“He explained that the world was round,” the book says of Park Yong Chul, the first person to tell Mr. Shin about a North Korean city called Pyongyang and about what it was like to eat grilled meat. “He fantasized about escaping with Park because he wanted to eat like Park.”
The escape provides one of the book’s grisliest stories, which is saying a lot. (Hint: “The human body is unpredictable when it comes to conducting electricity.”) And Mr. Shin finds himself outside the camp, alone. “Escape from Camp 14” follows his steps to China, then Seoul, then California and Seattle and on again (he now lives in Seoul and Washington), but it becomes less certain with each step forward. Just as Mr. Shin, “a scrawny, incurious and for the most part friendless child whose one source of certainty was the guards’ lectures about redemption through snitching,” is not a model prisoner, his is not a model redemption.
The book ends on an uncertain note, with Mr. Shin’s delivering a slick, carefully prepared speech about his own ordeal and the urgent need to liberate other North Korean prisoners. “In that speech, if not yet in his life, Shin had seized control of his past,” Mr. Harden writes cautiously.
But “Escape From Camp 14” offers no easy answers about how Mr. Shin can deal with a newly guilty conscience, a lack of introspection, a checkered work history and the difficult adjustment to post-traumatic life. He had remarkable powers of endurance against the toughest physical torment. Those powers are being tested still.
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