North Korean Born in a Prison Camp: ‘My Favorite Word is Freedom’ (+video)

Photo Credit: Screenshot: UNA North Korean who was born in a camp for political prisoners and saw family members executed appealed to the international community this week to “relieve my North Korean brothers and sisters,” saying hundreds of thousands of political prisoners in his country were waiting for their deaths.

Addressing the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva, 31 year-old Shin Dong-Hyuk said his parents were political prisoners and he became a political prisoner too from the moment of his birth.

Aged 14, he and his father were forced to watch his mother and brother’s public execution, he said. “I couldn’t cry at that moment. I never learned how to cry …”

Shin was born in 1982 in Kwan-li-so (political penal labor camp) no. 14 in Kaechon, north of Pyongyang. His account of life in the camp, and his perilous escape in 2005 were told in a 2012 biography by journalist Blaine Harden, Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey From North Korea to Freedom in the West.

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