WEBVTT 00:00:09.682 --> 00:00:12.741 I've been a journalist for 32 years, 00:00:12.741 --> 00:00:17.151 and I'm going to tell you about the saddest story that I've ever heard. 00:00:18.782 --> 00:00:26.137 Inside Camp 14, 13-year-old inmate named Shin Dong-hyuk 00:00:27.680 --> 00:00:30.292 betrayed his family. 00:00:32.539 --> 00:00:35.334 It was late at night, he was supposed to be asleep 00:00:36.427 --> 00:00:38.389 but he heard his mother and brother 00:00:38.389 --> 00:00:41.202 talking about a plan to escape from the camp. 00:00:42.495 --> 00:00:45.257 The rules of Camp 14 are clear. 00:00:46.796 --> 00:00:49.538 If you try to escape, you'll be shot. 00:00:50.615 --> 00:00:53.746 If you hear someone talking about escape 00:00:53.746 --> 00:00:57.387 and you fail to report it, you'll be shot. 00:00:58.249 --> 00:01:02.388 Shin got out of bed, told his mother he had to pee 00:01:02.388 --> 00:01:06.561 walked outside and found a guard. 00:01:06.561 --> 00:01:11.179 While he was snitching, he asked for more food 00:01:11.179 --> 00:01:13.511 and easier work. 00:01:14.481 --> 00:01:17.860 About seven months later -- 00:01:19.937 --> 00:01:21.691 about seven months later, 00:01:21.691 --> 00:01:24.925 he was taken to the execution grounds in the camp. 00:01:24.925 --> 00:01:27.214 A place that he'd gone to twice a year 00:01:27.214 --> 00:01:29.990 ever since he was five years old. 00:01:29.990 --> 00:01:32.006 There, the entire camp was assembled. 00:01:32.006 --> 00:01:36.087 There were about 20,000 people in Camp 14 at the time. 00:01:36.087 --> 00:01:39.152 He was taken to the front, and he witnessed 00:01:39.152 --> 00:01:43.967 the shooting death of his brother, and the hanging of his mother. 00:01:45.075 --> 00:01:48.346 Before his mother died, she tried to catch his eye. 00:01:49.931 --> 00:01:52.780 He refused to look at her. 00:01:52.780 --> 00:01:56.358 For the next 10 years, he felt no guilt 00:01:56.358 --> 00:01:59.940 for his role in the death of his brother and mother. 00:02:04.293 --> 00:02:07.258 In concentration camps survivor stories, 00:02:07.258 --> 00:02:10.304 there is a conventional narrative arc. 00:02:10.304 --> 00:02:15.012 The protagonist is taken away by security forces 00:02:15.012 --> 00:02:18.885 from a comfortable home and a loving family. 00:02:18.885 --> 00:02:22.587 The most famous of these stories, I'm sure most of you've read 00:02:22.587 --> 00:02:25.970 is by Elie Wiesel, it's called "Night." 00:02:25.970 --> 00:02:30.268 In the book, he writes that, after his entire family perished 00:02:30.268 --> 00:02:33.500 in the Nazi death camps, he was alone. 00:02:33.500 --> 00:02:37.079 Terribly alone. In a world without man, 00:02:37.079 --> 00:02:42.347 without God, without love, without mercy. 00:02:42.347 --> 00:02:46.433 Shin's story is even darker. 00:02:46.433 --> 00:02:50.348 Words like love, mercy, family -- 00:02:50.348 --> 00:02:53.156 for him had no meaning at all. 00:02:53.156 --> 00:02:59.572 God did not disappear or die. Shin had never heard of him. 00:03:00.772 --> 00:03:03.892 In "Night," Wiesel writes 00:03:03.892 --> 00:03:09.065 that an adolescent's knowledge of evil should come from reading books. 00:03:11.804 --> 00:03:13.342 In Camp 14, 00:03:13.342 --> 00:03:17.605 Shin saw only one book, a Korean grammar 00:03:17.605 --> 00:03:21.241 in the hands of his teacher. A man who wore a uniform, 00:03:21.241 --> 00:03:25.577 had a gun on his hip, and who beat one of Shin's classmates 00:03:25.577 --> 00:03:28.854 to death with a chalkboard pointer. 00:03:30.854 --> 00:03:33.603 Shin did not abandon 00:03:33.603 --> 00:03:37.223 civilization and descend into hell. 00:03:37.223 --> 00:03:40.519 Uniquely among all the concentration camp survivors 00:03:40.519 --> 00:03:44.539 we know, he was born there. He accepted its rules. 00:03:44.539 --> 00:03:47.423 He regarded it as home. 00:03:51.345 --> 00:03:55.709 In a very real way, Shin was a creation 00:03:55.709 --> 00:04:01.403 of the guards in Camp 14. They were quite literally his breeders. 00:04:01.403 --> 00:04:05.083 They chose his parents, who were young adults in the camp 00:04:05.083 --> 00:04:07.778 and they ordered them to have sex. 00:04:07.778 --> 00:04:13.398 He was raised mostly by the guards. He had a very bad relationship with his mother. 00:04:13.398 --> 00:04:16.491 But he was raised by the guards, 00:04:16.491 --> 00:04:20.696 to snitch on his parents, and to snitch on his friends. 00:04:20.696 --> 00:04:24.602 It was a long playing behavioral experiment 00:04:24.602 --> 00:04:28.364 run by the security apparatus of North Korea. 00:04:28.364 --> 00:04:32.739 And, it continues to this day. The rules are very simple. 00:04:32.739 --> 00:04:36.911 The more you snitched, the more you ate. 00:04:36.911 --> 00:04:39.559 Let me ask you, how many of you knew 00:04:39.559 --> 00:04:44.320 before I started talking, that there are concentration camps in North Korea? 00:04:44.320 --> 00:04:46.317 That's good. 00:04:46.317 --> 00:04:50.488 Well, there are about six of them. Between four and six. 00:04:50.488 --> 00:04:55.134 135,000 to 200,000 people are in them right now. 00:04:55.134 --> 00:04:57.240 Half of them are the relatives 00:04:57.240 --> 00:05:01.797 of perceived political enemies of the state. NOTE Paragraph 00:05:01.797 --> 00:05:03.217 The relatives. 00:05:03.217 --> 00:05:07.126 The way justice works in North Korea, there's collective punishment. 00:05:07.126 --> 00:05:11.896 If I were to say that the leaders were stupid and corrupt 00:05:11.896 --> 00:05:15.731 my kids and my parents would go with me to a camp 00:05:15.731 --> 00:05:22.357 like Camp 14, and eating a diet of corn, cabbage and salt, we would all be worked to death. 00:05:22.357 --> 00:05:26.143 These camps have existed for half a century. 00:05:26.143 --> 00:05:30.836 They're clearly visible on Google Earth, you can see them on your Smartphone. 00:05:30.836 --> 00:05:33.821 North Korea continues to deny, 00:05:33.821 --> 00:05:37.149 officially deny that they exist. 00:05:37.149 --> 00:05:40.973 North Korea didn't invent these camps. 00:05:40.973 --> 00:05:44.621 They were invented in this form by Stalin. 00:05:44.621 --> 00:05:49.639 But, when Stalin died in the former Soviet Union, 00:05:49.639 --> 00:05:52.861 the camps died out too. 00:05:52.861 --> 00:05:59.409 In North Korea however, the camps have survived the death of founding dictator, 00:05:59.409 --> 00:06:04.101 they've survived the death of his son, 00:06:04.117 --> 00:06:07.856 and they're thriving now with the third generation 00:06:07.856 --> 00:06:12.261 of totalitarian leadership, Kim Jong Un. 00:06:12.261 --> 00:06:16.227 Who's about 28, 29 years old. Coincidentally, he happens to be 00:06:16.227 --> 00:06:20.585 about the same age as Shin. 00:06:20.585 --> 00:06:24.203 But you can see from this slide the camps have existed 00:06:24.203 --> 00:06:28.225 twice as long as the camps in the Soviet Union, 00:06:28.225 --> 00:06:32.609 about 12 times as long as the camps in Hitler's Germany. 00:06:32.609 --> 00:06:38.030 And the reason North Korea seems to have lost none of its appetite 00:06:38.030 --> 00:06:41.715 for being cruel to its own people. 00:06:41.715 --> 00:06:46.372 They're just as cruel now as they were 50 years ago. 00:06:46.372 --> 00:06:50.860 The camps are operated in almost exactly the same way. 00:06:50.860 --> 00:06:55.773 Shin's story is the case study in that cruelty. 00:06:55.773 --> 00:06:57.843 He's the only person, 00:06:57.843 --> 00:07:01.582 the only person so far, born and raised in those camps 00:07:01.582 --> 00:07:05.024 to get out and tell the story. 00:07:05.024 --> 00:07:12.105 But, his story is more than just a tale of state-sponsored sadism. 00:07:12.105 --> 00:07:16.930 It is an escape adventure, and it's a story about the resilience 00:07:16.930 --> 00:07:19.737 of the human spirit. 00:07:19.737 --> 00:07:25.570 The guards in Camp 14 spent 23 years trying to turn Shin 00:07:25.570 --> 00:07:30.060 into a blinkard, malleable slave and they failed. 00:07:30.999 --> 00:07:34.792 They failed because he was very lucky when he was 23. 00:07:34.792 --> 00:07:41.522 A newcomer came to the camp, and this was an individual who had been raised in Pyongyang. 00:07:41.522 --> 00:07:45.267 A member of the elite. He'd been educated in the former Soviet Union. 00:07:45.267 --> 00:07:49.062 Shin's job, was to teach Park, that was the guy's name, 00:07:49.062 --> 00:07:52.871 how to fix sewing machines in the uniform factory. 00:07:52.871 --> 00:07:58.305 Shin was also supposed to snitch on Park, to find out what he thought 00:07:58.305 --> 00:08:02.532 about the leadership, and then report to his superior. 00:08:02.532 --> 00:08:06.280 For the first time in his life, though, instead of snitching 00:08:06.280 --> 00:08:09.933 Shin listened to what Park had to say. 00:08:09.933 --> 00:08:13.317 Park told him -- broke the news to him 00:08:13.317 --> 00:08:17.267 that the world was round, which was news to Shin. 00:08:17.267 --> 00:08:20.351 He told him that the United States, 00:08:20.351 --> 00:08:23.084 South Korea and China existed. 00:08:24.192 --> 00:08:27.770 But, he also said, and this is what got Shin's interest -- 00:08:27.770 --> 00:08:30.342 He said, "If you get out of here, if you get out of this camp, 00:08:30.342 --> 00:08:34.422 and went to China, you could eat grilled meat". 00:08:34.422 --> 00:08:37.936 That's what interested Shin. (Laughter) 00:08:37.936 --> 00:08:41.350 He started dreaming about grilled meat. 00:08:41.350 --> 00:08:43.866 Within a few weeks he asked Shin -- 00:08:43.866 --> 00:08:48.187 Shin asked Park to escape together. 00:08:49.878 --> 00:08:51.836 Park agreed. 00:08:51.836 --> 00:08:55.389 On January 2nd, 2005 00:08:55.389 --> 00:08:59.060 they went for the fence. The electric fence. 00:08:59.060 --> 00:09:02.011 The electrified fence that surrounds the camp. 00:09:02.935 --> 00:09:05.866 Shin was supposed to be the Mr Inside Guy in this escape attempt. 00:09:05.866 --> 00:09:10.562 He was supposed to get to the fence first, then Park having more knowledge 00:09:10.562 --> 00:09:14.326 of the outside world, would lead them to China. 00:09:14.326 --> 00:09:20.770 Unfortunately, as they ran towards the fence, on a snowy cold evening up in the mountains, 00:09:20.770 --> 00:09:22.778 Shin slipped and fell on his face 00:09:22.778 --> 00:09:25.174 and Park got to the fence first. 00:09:25.698 --> 00:09:30.937 He was electrocuted on the fence. Shin did not hesitate, though. 00:09:30.937 --> 00:09:35.587 He crawled over Park's smoldering body and ran off. 00:09:37.217 --> 00:09:40.344 The Mr. Outside Guy on that escape attempt 00:09:40.344 --> 00:09:42.654 unfortunately was dead on the fence. 00:09:42.654 --> 00:09:45.802 But Shin still, through a combination of luck, 00:09:45.802 --> 00:09:53.115 keeping his mouth shut, and being shrewd, he found his way out of North Corea in 30 days. 00:09:54.208 --> 00:09:57.735 In a year-and-a-half he'd found his way across China 00:09:57.735 --> 00:10:00.626 and found his way to South Korea. 00:10:00.626 --> 00:10:05.662 Two years later he was living in Southern California. 00:10:05.662 --> 00:10:10.926 Eating at In-and-Out Burger, which he still says it's the best burger in the US. 00:10:10.926 --> 00:10:13.828 (Laughter) 00:10:13.828 --> 00:10:17.735 And he was working for LiNK, 'Liberty in North Korea' 00:10:17.735 --> 00:10:20.685 as a Human Rights volunteer. 00:10:20.685 --> 00:10:24.439 But, he's not been a very happy person outside the camp. 00:10:24.439 --> 00:10:28.366 He's struggling to understand what it means to be free. 00:10:28.366 --> 00:10:33.469 He says that he's physically outside, but not psychologically outside barbed wire. 00:10:34.393 --> 00:10:36.798 One of the things he told me is 00:10:36.798 --> 00:10:40.914 that he's evolving from being an animal into trying to be a human being. 00:10:40.914 --> 00:10:43.775 But it's going very, very slowly. 00:10:44.560 --> 00:10:47.538 Very slowly. He still has dreams 00:10:47.538 --> 00:10:49.814 about his mother's death. 00:10:52.490 --> 00:11:00.027 What's terrifying though is that Shin's story is not an isolated tale of horror. 00:11:00.027 --> 00:11:05.284 The two other big adjustment problems that are going on, or that will soon go on. 00:11:05.284 --> 00:11:09.323 There are 24,000 North Koreans now living in South Korea. 00:11:09.323 --> 00:11:12.758 Almost all of them have come there in the past 12 years. 00:11:12.758 --> 00:11:17.823 Almost all of them have been examined by government psychiatrists and psychologists 00:11:17.823 --> 00:11:21.573 in South Korea who say that, virtually all of them are clinically paranoid, 00:11:21.573 --> 00:11:26.246 a useful adjustment for life in North Korea, a place that crawls with security agents 00:11:26.246 --> 00:11:30.596 but they have a very difficult time adapting to modern life. 00:11:30.596 --> 00:11:35.435 They have a hard time distinguishing between criticism and betrayal. 00:11:35.435 --> 00:11:42.042 And, there are 24 million people in North Korea who, if that state ever collapses 00:11:42.042 --> 00:11:45.159 will have to go through the same adjustment problems. 00:11:45.159 --> 00:11:49.633 And no one is thinking that North Korea is on the verge of collapse, 00:11:49.633 --> 00:11:52.817 but totalitarian systems don't last forever. 00:11:52.817 --> 00:11:56.763 And, someday, all of those people will have to go through a version 00:11:56.763 --> 00:11:59.502 of what Shin has gone through. 00:11:59.502 --> 00:12:04.687 Now, the reason Shin told me his awful story 00:12:04.687 --> 00:12:08.072 was because he wants you to know 00:12:08.072 --> 00:12:12.058 that these camps are still in operation. 00:12:12.058 --> 00:12:17.411 They're still breeding children. They're still teaching them to betray their parents. 00:12:20.072 --> 00:12:25.679 He doesn't believe that knowing about this is going to overthrow North Korea. 00:12:25.679 --> 00:12:29.016 But, he went through the humiliation of telling me his story 00:12:29.016 --> 00:12:31.284 and he's traveling the world talking about it, 00:12:31.284 --> 00:12:35.060 because he believes that knowledge is better than ignorance. 00:12:36.676 --> 00:12:40.047 Thank you very much. 00:12:40.047 --> 00:12:42.331 (Applause)