Rather, they said, she lost the will to live after the death of her sister, Margot. Shin had been born in Camp 14, one of the many labor camps scattered across North Korea. Shin was a defector from North Korea, one of the most brutal, repressive states on the planet. Women who knew Anne Frank in the Bergen-Belsen camp said that neither hunger nor typhus killed the young girl who would become the most famous diarist of the Nazi era. Blaine Harden, quote from Escape from Camp 14: One Mans Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West Like Nazi concentration camps, labour camps in North Korea use confinement, hunger and fear to create a kind of Skinner box: a closed, closely regulated chamber in which guards assert absolute control over prisoners. Escape from Camp 14 Summary Next Foreword In 2008, the reporter Blaine Harden met with a young man named Shin In Geun. 12K views 10 years ago Twenty-six years ago, Shin Dong-hyuk was born inside Camp 14, one of five sprawling political prisons in the mountains of North Korea. could only be a social achievement, not an individual accident, wrote Eugene Weinstock, a Belgian resistance fighter and Hungarian-born Jew who was sent to Buchenwald in 1943.įinally the death of one member of a pair often doomed the other. If one member of a pair fainted from hunger in front of an SS officer, the other would prop him up. Pairs stole food and clothing for each other, exchanged small gifts and planned for the future. Escape From Camp 14 is the harrowing story of Shin Dong-hyuk, the only person to have been born and raised in a North Korean prison camp and to have escaped to the West. “ t was in the pairs that the prisoners kept alive the semblance of humanity concluded Elmer Luchterhand, a sociologist at Yale who interviewed fifty-two concentration camp survivors shortly after liberation.

Escape from Camp 14 by Blaine Harden