Escape from Camp 14: Shin Dong-hyuk's Odyssey - Blaine Harden at TEDxRainier

Hear the astonishing story of Shin Dong-hyuk's escape from the notorious yet almost unknown Camp 14 in North Korea, where totalitarian State supported sadism 'teaches' prisioners and children alike into how not to be a human being.

I've been a journalist for 32 years,

and I'm going to tell you about the saddest story
that I've ever heard.

Inside Camp 14, 13-year-old inmate
named Shin Dong-hyuk

betrayed his family.

It was late at night,
he was supposed to be asleep

but he heard his mother and brother

talking about a plan
to escape from the camp.

The rules of Camp 14 are clear.

If you try to escape, you'll be shot.

If you hear someone talking about escape

and you fail to report it, you'll be shot.

Shin got out of bed,
told his mother he had to pee

walked outside and found a guard.

While he was snitching,
he asked for more food

and easier work.

About seven months later --

about seven months later,

he was taken to the execution grounds in the camp.

A place that he'd gone to twice a year

ever since he was five years old.

There, the entire camp was assembled.

There were about 20,000 people
in Camp 14 at the time.

He was taken to the front,
and he witnessed

the shooting death of his brother,
and the hanging of his mother.

Before his mother died,
she tried to catch his eye.

He refused to look at her.

For the next 10 years,
he felt no guilt

for his role in the death
of his brother and mother.

In concentration camps survivor stories,

there is a conventional narrative arc.

The protagonist is taken away
by security forces

from a comfortable home
and a loving family.

The most famous of these stories,
I'm sure most of you've read

is by Elie Wiesel, it's called "Night."

In the book, he writes that,
after his entire family perished

in the Nazi death camps, he was alone.

Terribly alone. In a world without man,

without God, without love, without mercy.

Shin's story is even darker.

Words like love, mercy, family --

for him had no meaning at all.

God did not disappear or die.
Shin had never heard of him.

In "Night," Wiesel writes

that an adolescent's knowledge of evil
should come from reading books.

In Camp 14,

Shin saw only one book,
a Korean grammar

in the hands of his teacher.
A man who wore a uniform,

had a gun on his hip,
and who beat one of Shin's classmates

to death with a chalkboard pointer.

Shin did not abandon

civilization and descend into hell.

Uniquely among all
the concentration camp survivors

we know, he was born there.
He accepted its rules.

He regarded it as home.

In a very real way,
Shin was a creation

of the guards in Camp 14.
They were quite literally his breeders.

They chose his parents,
who were young adults in the camp

and they ordered them
to have sex.

He was raised mostly by the guards.
He had a very bad relationship with his mother.

But he was raised by the guards,

to snitch on his parents,
and to snitch on his friends.

It was a long playing behavioral experiment

run by the security apparatus of North Korea.

And, it continues to this day.
The rules are very simple.

The more you snitched,
the more you ate.

Let me ask you,
how many of you knew

before I started talking, that there are
concentration camps in North Korea?

That's good.

Well, there are about six of them.
Between four and six.

135,000 to 200,000 people
are in them right now.

Half of them are the relatives

of perceived political enemies of the state.

The relatives.

The way justice works in North Korea,
there's collective punishment.

If I were to say that the leaders
were stupid and corrupt

my kids and my parents
would go with me to a camp

like Camp 14, and eating a diet of corn,
cabbage and salt, we would all be worked to death.

These camps have existed for half a century.

They're clearly visible on Google Earth,
you can see them on your Smartphone.

North Korea continues to deny,

officially deny that they exist.

North Korea didn't invent these camps.

They were invented
in this form by Stalin.

But, when Stalin died
in the former Soviet Union,

the camps died out too.

In North Korea however, the camps
have survived the death of founding dictator,

they've survived the death of his son,

and they're thriving now
with the third generation

of totalitarian leadership, Kim Jong Un.

Who's about 28, 29 years old.
Coincidentally, he happens to be

about the same age as Shin.

But you can see from this slide
the camps have existed

twice as long as the camps
in the Soviet Union,

about 12 times as long as the camps
in Hitler's Germany.

And the reason North Korea
seems to have lost none of its appetite

for being cruel to its own people.

They're just as cruel now
as they were 50 years ago.

The camps are operated
in almost exactly the same way.

Shin's story is the case study in that cruelty.

He's the only person,

the only person so far,
born and raised in those camps

to get out and tell the story.

But, his story is more than just a tale
of state-sponsored sadism.

It is an escape adventure,
and it's a story about the resilience

of the human spirit.

The guards in Camp 14
spent 23 years trying to turn Shin

into a blinkard, malleable slave
and they failed.

They failed because he was very lucky
when he was 23.

A newcomer came to the camp, and this was
an individual who had been raised in Pyongyang.

A member of the elite.
He'd been educated in the former Soviet Union.

Shin's job, was to teach Park,
that was the guy's name,

how to fix sewing machines
in the uniform factory.

Shin was also supposed to snitch on Park,
to find out what he thought

about the leadership,
and then report to his superior.

For the first time in his life,
though, instead of snitching

Shin listened to what Park had to say.

Park told him --
broke the news to him

that the world was round,
which was news to Shin.

He told him that the United States,

South Korea and China existed.

But, he also said, and this is
what got Shin's interest --

He said, "If you get out of here,
if you get out of this camp,

and went to China,
you could eat grilled meat".

That's what interested Shin.
(Laughter)

He started dreaming about grilled meat.

Within a few weeks he asked Shin --

Shin asked Park
to escape together.

Park agreed.

On January 2nd, 2005

they went for the fence.
The electric fence.

The electrified fence
that surrounds the camp.

Shin was supposed to be the Mr Inside Guy
in this escape attempt.

He was supposed to get to the fence first,
then Park having more knowledge

of the outside world,
would lead them to China.

Unfortunately, as they ran towards the fence,
on a snowy cold evening up in the mountains,

Shin slipped and fell on his face

and Park got to the fence first.

He was electrocuted on the fence.
Shin did not hesitate, though.

He crawled over
Park's smoldering body and ran off.

The Mr. Outside Guy on that escape attempt

unfortunately was dead on the fence.

But Shin still, through a combination of luck,

keeping his mouth shut, and being shrewd,
he found his way out of North Corea in 30 days.

In a year-and-a-half
he'd found his way across China

and found his way to South Korea.

Two years later he was living
in Southern California.

Eating at In-and-Out Burger, which he still says
it's the best burger in the US.

(Laughter)

And he was working for LiNK,
'Liberty in North Korea'

as a Human Rights volunteer.

But, he's not been a very happy person
outside the camp.

He's struggling to understand
what it means to be free.

He says that he's physically outside,
but not psychologically outside barbed wire.

One of the things he told me is

that he's evolving from being an animal
into trying to be a human being.

But it's going very, very slowly.

Very slowly. He still has dreams

about his mother's death.

What's terrifying though is that Shin's story
is not an isolated tale of horror.

The two other big adjustment problems
that are going on, or that will soon go on.

There are 24,000 North Koreans
now living in South Korea.

Almost all of them have come there
in the past 12 years.

Almost all of them have been examined
by government psychiatrists and psychologists

in South Korea who say that,
virtually all of them are clinically paranoid,

a useful adjustment for life in North Korea,
a place that crawls with security agents

but they have a very difficult time
adapting to modern life.

They have a hard time distinguishing
between criticism and betrayal.

And, there are 24 million people in North Korea
who, if that state ever collapses

will have to go through
the same adjustment problems.

And no one is thinking that North Korea
is on the verge of collapse,

but totalitarian systems don't last forever.

And, someday, all of those people
will have to go through a version

of what Shin has gone through.

Now, the reason Shin told me his awful story

was because he wants you to know

that these camps are still in operation.

They're still breeding children.
They're still teaching them to betray their parents.

He doesn't believe that knowing about this
is going to overthrow North Korea.

But, he went through the humiliation
of telling me his story

and he's traveling the world talking about it,

because he believes that knowledge
is better than ignorance.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)