Mick Hartley

There are over 14,000 North Korean defectors living in South Korea. Shin Dong-hyuk is the only one known to have escaped to the South from a prison camp in the North:

"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 confined — 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," said Kim. "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 now being held in the North's prison camps. Many of the camps can be seen in satellite images, but North Korea denies their existence.

In recent weeks, Shin has been watching old films of the Allied liberation of Nazi concentration camps, which included 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 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.

An unforgettable — almost unfathomable — chapter of that story is about the execution of his mother, who was hanged in 1996, on the same day Shin's only brother was shot to death. Both killings, Shin writes in his book, occurred at Camp No. 14 in a kind of public square, a place where he had seen many others executed.

Before he was taken to the square and ordered to watch them die, Shin said, he had spent seven months in an underground cell, where guards used torture to force him to talk about a supposed "family conspiracy" to escape from the camp.

Since his mother hadn't told him about such a plan, Shin said, he was startled to hear of it. His torturers also surprised him by telling 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.

As for the escape plan of his mother and brother, Shin knew nothing. Still, the guards wanted a confession.

As described in the book, they built a charcoal fire. Shin was stripped of his clothes. Ropes were tied to his arms and legs and secured to the ceiling of the cell. He was dangled over the fire. When he writhed away from the flame, a guard pierced his gut with a steel hook to hold him in place. He lost consciousness.

Shin recovered in a cell with the help of a sickly older man who gave him half his food ration. Months later, when Shin walked out of the underground cell to the public square, he was joined by his father.

"When I saw that place, I thought my father and I would be executed," Shin said in the interview.

Instead, to his surprise, he became a spectator. His mother and brother were brought to the square.

Watching his mother being hanged, Shin recalls, he was relieved it was her, not him.

"I felt she deserved to die," he said. "I was full of anger for the torture that I went through. I still am angry at her."