Interviews with Shin Dong-hyuk

As a person born as a prisoner in the prison camp, I had somebody that I called “Father” and “Mother.”

[Shin Dong-hyuk’s birth was the result of a “reward marriage” orchestrated by prison officials. These “marriages” were granted to prisoners for being a good worker.]

Those were the words that I knew to use to describe these two people in my life, but there was no love, no desire to give them things, or desire to help them.

There was nothing in the sense of a familial relationship between my parents and me.

My mother and brother were caught attempting to escape from the prison camp.

As a result, my father and I were beaten and tortured for a long period, and I still bear the scars from that horrible experience.

In the prison camp, if one person in the family commits a crime or is found guilty of something, then the entire family is punished.

Unfortunately, my mother and brother were publicly executed. Luckily, my father and I were not.

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).