Interviews with Shin Dong-hyuk

My name is Shin Dong-hyuk and I was born in North Korea in a political prison camp where I lived for 24 years. Then I escaped. Right now I am resettled and live in South Korea.

In North Korea there are laws, regardless of whether the law is good or bad for the people, and if that particular law is broken or the State considers it to have been broken, then the people are punished by being sent to prison camps.

But as far as young children and babies being born into prison camps, it is very rare for something like that to happen.

I think there are over 200 nations in this world, but the only nation where people are being born into prison camps and where generations are incarcerated into prison camps where they are born, live, and ultimately die in the prison camp.

I believe North Korea is the first, last and only nation to have such a system.

In the political prison camps of North Korea, a baby being born into the prison camp isn’t a simple thing.

There exists something called a reward or accommodation marriage whereby a prison inmate, considered to be a good worker, will be rewarded with a marriage ordered by the prison officials.

This so called “couple” will basically mate and have a baby, and this baby will be born into a life of being a prisoner because the baby´s parents were prisoners in the prison camp.

Shin Dong Hyuk is the only known person to be born in a North Korean gulag and escape to freedom. In North Korea, whole families are incarcerated for the offenses of a single family member. As many as 130,000 men, women and children are imprisoned in North Korea’s vast system of gulags.

Shin was born in 1982 in Camp 14, the product of a “reward marriage” between two prisoners. He lived with his mother until the age of 12, though they never formed a true familial bond. Shin received a basic education before being pressed into the camp’s labor force. During this time, he witnessed fellow children being beaten, executed and killed in work-related accidents.

In 1996, prison officials brought Shin to a separate detention facility where he was tortured. He had no idea why this was happening to him. Finally, the guards explained that his mother and brother had attempted to escape and they wanted more information. After being held in an underground cell for seven months, Shin was forced to attend the public execution of his mother and brother.

In 2005, Shin and another prisoner were assigned to work on a mountain. Driven by hunger, the two decided to escape over the electrified fence enclosing the camp. Shin’s leg was caught in the fence and scarred, but he managed to get through; the other prisoner was electrocuted and died. From there, Shin managed to cross the border into China where he worked as a laborer for several years until connecting with a journalist who brought him to the South Korean Embassy. From there, Shin escaped China.

Shin’s incredible story has been shared with the world in the book, Escape from Camp 14, by American journalist Blaine Harden. Since escaping, Shin has become a leading voice on North Korean human rights and the country’s gulag system, including providing testimony at the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea).