The story of one of the few people ever to have escaped from a North Korean political prison. Shin Dong-hyuk was one of around 200,000 people held in North Korea's brutal prison camps, which have existed twice as long as Stalin's Soviet political prisons and twelve times as long as the Nazi concentration camps.
Shin was born in prison - his parents were imprisoned for some minor mistake, transgressing any one of the numerous illogical and inhuman rules of this backward nation - and after years of working in the prison's coal mines, sewing machine factories, and pig farms, he risked everything to clamber through electrified fences and basically walked and hitched rides across thousands of miles of North Korea and neighboring China, to eventually make his way to South Korea and true freedom.
This story brings us right up to date - Shin is now living in the USA - and details the horrors of murder, starvation, cruelty, and back-breaking work heaped on so many of his kind.
Not as flashy as many, similar escape stories, but nonetheless it's a vivid account of the desperate lives of so may thousands who are still held against their will by a repressive government.
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