Cecily's Reviews > Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West

Picture from documentary Camp 14

Imagine the Unimaginable

Imagine growing up with no comprehension, let alone experience of love or friendship, where every day you struggle for scraps of food, rest, and warmth, striving to avoiding abuse, imprisonment, and maybe execution.

Where you view your own mother as “competition for survival”, rather than a source of love, security, and comfort.

Where “redemption through snitching” and hard work is essential for survival, and you are inured to the punishment and murder of others, because it’s commonplace and always deserved.

Where you are too broken, ignorant, and worthless for the authorities to bother brainwashing you with political propaganda.

I hope that is almost unimaginable for you, but that was the life of Shin Dong-hyuk, born and raised in a North Korean “complete control district” labour camp. Extreme deprivation and brutality were all he knew.

The Sins of the Forefathers

Shin's “crime”, in this godless place (not even The Dear Leader was known to him) was a version of original sin: that his blood was tainted by the alleged sins of an uncle. The camp had to cleanse three generations.

Escape? Why? To What?

For prisoners with no knowledge of anything beyond the camp walls, the desire, let alone the possibility of escape, rarely arises. It is literally unimaginable.

Those who do escape are likely to find themselves in either China or South Korea. And then what?

In China, they have to hide from the authorities, lest they’re sent back to NK. So much for hard-won freedom.

In SK, only the language is familiar, and even that has diverged significantly in recent decades.

How can North Koreans comprehend, let alone make a life in the fast-paced, neon-lit world of what is arguably the most competitive, consumerist, stressful society on the planet, when they’ve lived without electricity, furniture, and running water, never sat an exam, have no friends - and don’t even know how to make any?

Truth, and the Telling of it

This is a true story. Probably. Mostly.

There are many defectors from NK, some of whom escaped from prisons or labour camps, but Shin is thought to be the only person born in a camp to escape from that camp, which makes his experience more extreme.

This should be a really exciting, but agonising story. Unfortunately, I didn’t find it so. The writing was flat, with long chunks of geo-political history breaking up Shin’s story: ten (yes, ten) pages about NK’s global insurance fraud, three pages about the history of dams and so on. And because Shin was raised amoral and psychologically damaged, and his lack of trust make him reluctant to accept advice, he wasn’t always as sympathetic a character as his suffering should merit.

More fundamentally, the book’s power was diluted by extraordinary luck at crucial moments, made less credible by inconsistencies in the story. Furthermore, Shin changed other aspects of his story during the writing of the book, and again after it was published. Some of the reasons are understandable (if you’d betrayed your mother, leading to her death, you would discover that was shocking to people outside, and ultimately find it a guilty burden). But as a reader, I was left unsure of the truth.

The book ends with half a dozen “Sketches from Shin’s life in Camp 14”, though whether they’re drawn by Shin or from his descriptions is unclear.

The Big Picture

Harry Harlow’s rhesus macaque experiments on maternal deprivation are rightly considered unethical today. (See also John Bowlby on attachment theory.)

But far worse has been going on in NK, for twice as long as the Soviet Gulags, with hundreds of thousands of human victims. And it’s not a secret. NK may not have a campaigning figurehead like the Dalai Lama or Aung San Suu Kyi, but the world has known something of the number, scale, and brutality of these camps for many years, from escapees’ accounts and satellite imagery. International pressure is half-hearted at best.

SK provides money and practical support to defectors for a limited time, including three months in the Orwellian-sounding “House of Unity”. But the culture shock is so extreme, and the rest of SK society so at odds with these newcomers (and often resentful), that it’s woefully inadequate. Paranoia is the norm in defectors, and a real barrier to assimilation. Unemployment, depression, and suicide are shockingly high in refugees from NK.

I don’t know what the answer is. Nor do Shin or Harden. How do you force a nuclear power to do anything? Should aid to starving people be conditional on improved human rights? Perhaps that impasse is the greatest tragedy, the greatest failing.

As for Shin, he has struggled to adapt to life outside, but he is now a campaigner who has “harnessed his self-loathing and used it to indict the state that had poisoned his heart and killed his family”. That’s within sight of a happy ending.

The Ten Laws of Camp 14

1. Do not try to escape.
2. No more than two prisoners can meet together.
3. Do not steal.
4. Guards must be obeyed unconditionally.
5. Anyone who see a fugitive or suspicious figure must promptly report him.
6. Prisoners must watch each other and report any suspicious behaviour immediately.
7. Prisoners must more than fulfil the work assigned to them each day.
8. Beyond the workplace, there must be no intermingling between the sexes for personal reasons.
9. Prisoners must genuinely repent of their errors.
10. Prisoners who violate the laws and regulations of the camp will be shot immediately.

The devil really is in the chilling details, not included above.


Overall, 2* writing, but 3* for its importance.

It's real life contemporary dystopia: I think that's part of the fascination of books like this. Maybe there's a similarity with children loving dinosaurs: the thrill of them being real monsters, but we're out of reach. With dinosaurs, time keeps us safe, and with NK, it's geography.