While North Korea's prison camps are visible from spy satellites, we wouldn't know much
about them if not for the people who escaped both the prison camps and the country as a
whole.
While some of the stories and reports that these escapees have sold to the media have
come under scrutiny, especially as of late, they still offer the only glimpse that we
have into the hermit kingdom's most awful reality.
So, let's take a minute to look at the top 10 descriptions of the prison camps in North
Korea as told by those who survived them.
Jihyun Park
The first entry on this list, as bad as her experience was, was one of the lucky ones.
Keep that in mind.
Park escaped from North Korea in her youth after her father's dying wish was that his
remaining family flee North Korea.
She was able to enter into China after her mother used the little money they had to pay
their way past a border guard.
In China, she found someone who was supposed to give her a "good job", however, she was
actually sold into a form of slavery upon being purchased by an alcoholic who took her
in as his wife.
She was forced to work like a slave for up to 16 hours a day, with the only positive
in her life being the son that she had with her husband-slash-captor.
When her son was five years old she was arrested and deported back to North Korea, and then
sent to a prison camp where "the conditions were unspeakable" and she was worked like
an "animal".
Her main job was to clear out areas to make room for farm-land the inmates weren't even
allowed simple things like shoes.
Because of that, Park eventually ended up with gangrene in her feet and legs from the
open sores that she ended up getting from working shoeless.
She only was released from the prison once her gangrene reached a level that the guards
assumed she was going to die; they forced her out so they wouldn't have to deal with
her body.
She recovered and escaped back to China and reunited with her son, who had been left to
starve by her former captor.
She luckily received asylum in Britain with her son and a new husband, another defector.
Fairytale ending for a horror story.
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And now, take a deep breath, because it only gets worse from here.
Jeong Kwang-il
Jeong Kwang-il was a trader in North Korea that worked with the two countries along its
borders: China and the loathed South Korea.
China is the main ally of North Korea, but South Korea is an enemy - North Korea considers
themselves still at war with their neighbor to the south, as the Korean War never technically
ended.
Therefore, trading with the South is against the law, and it is a gigantic no-no for those
who have the nerve to engage in any sort of partnership with the South.
Kwang-il was one of those people and was caught; he was accused of not only trading with the
South but also of being a spy for them as well.
Soldiers beat Kwang-il so severely in an attempt to coax a confession out of him that they
permanently scarred the back of his head and almost killed him.
After ten months of enduring torture techniques like the "pigeon torture" method, Kwang-il
was sent to Yodok, one of the largest prisons in North Korea.
He joined 50,000 other inmates.
At Yodok, he was awakened every day at 5 a.m. and then forced to work after a meager breakfast
of rice and beans and corn.
Springtime meant working in the fields, but when winter came they were forced to cut up
and carry huge logs that were over 13 feet in length for more than two miles at a time.
Most people either ended up starving to death thanks to this arduous work schedule, or some
died from accidents while carrying logs that could easily crush a man.
Luckily, a senior guard checked into his file and decided after three years that Kwang-il
was "wrongfully accused".
Unfortunately, there was no happy ending for him as when he returned to his family he had
discovered that his home was gone and that they had disappeared.
He then fled to South Korea and still doesn't know what happened to his loved ones.
Kang Cheol Hwan
Kang Cheol Hwan is the perfect example of how the system of oppression works in North
Korea.
Hwan's grandfather was labeled as a traitor to the people, so his entire family were sent
to a prison camp when he was only ten years old.
If you thought that he'd have a better time because he was a child, you were wrong, as
Hwan described the other children as basically being nothing but skin and bones, like "beggars".
He too was immediately sentenced to carry heavy logs for hours a day, for miles and
miles.
Beatings were routine for those that couldn't handle their share of the work, and those
beatings were mostly carried out by the other inmates.
What differs from Hwan's account of the prison camps is that he described a prison within
the prison, for people who refused to do what they were told by the guards.
While all prisons have solitary confinement and "holes", imagine the North Korean version
of a hole.
It's as bad as you'd expect, with people being sentenced to over six months at a time in
tiny, filthy cells (which were often filled with cold and muddy water).
Because of the exposure to the elements, and the physical and psychological toll it took
on people, few actually survived it.
If you tried to escape you were either shot or hanged.
Hwan was finally released after a decade in the camp, which was half of his life at that
point.
Hyuk Kim
Hyuk Kim's story isn't different in terms of what he experienced but rather how he explained
the ways it all affected him as a human being.
Kim was 16 when he was sent to prison for attempting to sneak into China like many people
of all ages were doing, as they were literally starving to death and were looking for any
help, or hope.
During his three year sentence, Kim witnessed and was subjected to some of the "routine"
things that have propagated this list in terms of extremely hard labor, starvation, beatings
and the like.
However, he was able to verbalize this experience in a way that many others couldn't or wouldn't,
by saying that he felt like he lost all humanity while in the camp and stopped acting as a
human, or stopped acting based on logic, but instead started to just react based on fear,
like a cornered animal.
That's important because that lack of humanity works both ways; you'll learn of other accounts
further down this list that basically shows the guards were treating the prisoners like
animals and that disassociation is an important topic in terms of how things like this can
happen.
Ji Hyeon-A
Ji-Hyeon A, like many others near the border to China, had traveled there three times in
her life.
Each time she was caught and sent back to North Korea.
The third time ended in horror as she had met someone in China and had become pregnant.
Despite the alliance between the two countries, apparently, it was against the law for women
to have "mixed-race" children.
Because of that law, Hyeon-A was given an abortion against her will at the police station
without any medication to ease her suffering.
After that, she was sent to a prison camp where she witnessed pregnant women being beaten
and crying in the night as they miscarried their children.
There are other horrible accounts of this practice elsewhere on this list, but Hyeon-A's
story does have a silver lining as she has since testified against North Korea and her
story has at least in part, lead to some of the sanctions against the country.
The worst part is that most of prisoners’ stories will never be told and the true number
of deaths will never fully be known.
The Camps have been Described as "Worse than Auschwitz"
We're halfway through this list and are transitioning from the first-person stories of those that
have survived the camps in North Korea to more general facts about the camps as a whole.
It's important to provide some context for just how bad these camps are in terms of prisons
around the world now and also historically when compared to some of the more famous camps
that we grew up reading about in history class, like the Gulag in the Soviet Union or the
concentration camps of Nazi Germany.
A survivor of one of history's most awful and famous camps, Auschwitz, described the
conditions at the North Korean camps and the conditions that the people in them faced and
said that they were being treated worse than his experience at Auschwitz.
That's important because the treatment of Jews (and others) in those camps was so terrible
that it was the impetus for creating Israel as an independent nation, and the guilt felt
by countries that ignored reports out of German territories is still felt to this day.
The question is whether or not anything will be done to liberate the people in the North
Korean camps, and considering the climate right now, I guess we'll find out sooner rather
than later.
They're No Fans of Religion
One part of life in prison is that people are routinely executed for even the smallest
grievances.
In the early 20th century, when Communism almost took over the world, one key element
was the atheistic angle which dominated the governments and countries that fell under
the spell of Karl Marx's philosophy.
While Marx said that it was just that, a philosophy (and not a blueprint for governance), most
of the communist (or neo-communist) governments adopted Marx's loathing of religion.
While that loathing varies in terms of how the governments control their people (the
Russian Orthodox Church, for example, existed during the Soviet Union’s heyday), North
Korea appears to be on the more severe end of that spectrum.
That extends to the prison camps, where people are reportedly: “tortured and killed on
account of their religious affiliation, with officials instructed, “to wipe out the seed
of [Christian] reactionaries.”
The Amount of People in their Camps Rival the Size of a Small City
As with all things North Korea, it's hard to actually get a tab on just how many people
currently (or historically) have been in the prison camps.
Satellite photos can only show so much, and considering the immense amount of underground
tunnels and facilities that the North has dug in the past century, pictures from the
stratosphere can only scratch the surface.
However, the most thorough and accurate estimators have tabulated that between 80,000 and 130,000
people are currently toiling away in the North Korean prison camps.
While that might not sound like much compared to the prison population in the United States,
North Korea has less than ten percent of the population of the US, and the prison conditions
are clearly way less humane.
It makes sense, though, as North Korea is famous for imprisoning the entire, extended
families of people they deem as traitorous.
Beyond that, the people that are sent to camp are actually the "lucky" ones, as the number
of people that have been executed in lieu of prison has to be in the tens, if not hundreds,
of thousands since the start of the Kim regime.
Despite that large number, there really are only a handful of survivor stories that we
have to go on in terms of figuring out how people are treated in a country that looks
at the human rights accords passed internationally and laughs.
Just thank your lucky stars that you weren't born in North Korea.
The Prisoners are Starved
It's no secret that the people of North Korea have had times where their already scarce
food supply has become even more scarce.
After the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 90's, for example, the financial and
food support that the regime was receiving stopped, which toppled the controlled economy
of North Korea.
That created a famine that has defined the country and while things are "better" now
(with "better" being a relative term), food can still be a luxury.
That means the people in prison aren't fed regular, complete meals.
The prisoners often have to scavenge for their own food, by pulling plants from whatever
areas they're working in (in their seemingly never-ending job of moving gigantic logs to
and fro).
According to multiple reports, though, the prison guards don't just punish people for
doing this but they actually execute them.
While that may sound like cruelty for the sake of being cruel, it may serve a purpose,
as the guards could be tasked with lowering the population of the prisons, so there's
more food to go around.
Seems like they're just punishing whoever rubs them the wrong way, which I guess is
a justification but shows you how horrible life in these camps can be and is.
It's Even Worse for Women of Age
The worst stories to come out of North Korean prison camps come from those who either were
with child while in the camp or those that witnessed the treatment of women who were
of age.
Clearly, food is a problem for everyone in North Korea and was especially bad during
the famine periods that the country has had to deal with in its history.
Because of the limited amount of people who have escaped and the monetary component when
it comes to giving information to newspapers or television statements, it's hard to really
tell if what someone is saying about their experience in the camps is true.
The only way is to see if that information makes sense when applied to the information
gathered from other survivors and unfortunately that's the case when it comes to the treatment
of women who become pregnant.
Because of the work involved and the time, it would take for a woman to have a child,
or rest before and after having one, guards often beat women to induce a miscarriage.
For the unlucky mothers and babies that survive, a truly horrific death welcomes the surviving
child into the world as multiple survivors of the camps have described prison guards
feeding newborn children to guard dogs.
That's just the definition of the worst of humanity.
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