Nick Pateras | Escape from Camp 14
BOOK REVIEW
Escape from Camp 14 – Blaine Harden
A plain-clothes look at the frightful life inside North Korea’s concentration camps
Harden’s Escape from Camp 14 tells the unbelievable tale of the only known person to have been born inside North Korea’s infamous political labour camps and escaped successfully. For anyone even remotely interested in life inside the most secretive state on the planet, this book will have you absolutely hooked. While the simple language Harden employswould normally make this an easy read, the story of Shin Dong-Hyuk’s upbringing and escape makes for anything but. The egregious treatment of prisoners inside the camp and Shin’s many anecdotes illuminating the guards’ callousness forced me to put the book down several times and remind myself it wasn’t a novel. For instance, Shin describes how as a child he was often so hungry he would have to hunt for wild rats or snakes, or sift through horse feces for undigested kernels of corn. I lost track of the number of times the thought crossed my mind that the only real distinction between myself and Shin was that I won the lottery of birth, while he lost it.
"'I am evolving from being an animal', he said. 'Sometimes I try to cry and laugh like other people, just to see if it feels like anything. Yet tears don't come. Laughter doesn't come.'"
One of the book’s flaws in my opinion is that Harden sometimes is stingy with describing Shin’s emotions as he goes through unimaginable torment. Without giving away too many of the key incidents, Harden doesn’t seem to pick at (or certainly doesn’t share) how Shin felt in seeing his own mother hung in front of him, or the excitement of finally crossed the border into China. However, what the story may lack in emotive detail it more than makes up for in the pure insight it offers into North Korea. Harden must also be commended for including a lot of contextual information that offers a background to Shin’s story and educates even the most oblivious of readers on the atrocities and horrors that colour this fascinatingly bizarre country.
- NP, June 2013