The work quota as assigned by a guard may not be changed.

8. Beyond the workplace, there must be no intermingling between the sexes for personal reasons

Should sexual physical contact occur without prior approval, the perpetrators will be shot immediately.

Beyond the workplace, there must be no conversing between the sexes without prior approval.

One is prohibited from visiting bathrooms designated for members of the opposite sex without prior approval.

Without special reason, members of opposite sexes may not go about holding hands or sleep alongside each other.

Without prior approval, prisoners may not visit living quarters of the opposite sex.

9. Prisoners must genuinely repent of their errors

Anyone who does not acknowledge his sins and instead denies them or carries a deviant opinion of them will be shot immediately.

One must reflect deeply upon the sins he has committed against his country and society and strive to wash himself of them.

Only after having acknowledged sins and reflected deeply upon them can a prisoner begin anew.

10. Prisoners who violate the laws and regulations of the camp will be shot immediately

All prisoners must truly consider the guards as their teachers, and, abiding by the ten laws and regulations of the camp, yield themselves through toil and discipline to washing away their past errors.

Sketches from Shin’s Life in Camp 14

^{The teachers at Shin’s school in Camp 14 were uniformed guards. They always carried a pistol and Shin saw one of them beat a six-year-old classmate to death with a chalkboard pointer.}

^{Children in the camps scavenged constantly for food, eating rats, insects and undigested kernels of corn they found in cow dung.}

^{Shin watched as his mother was hanged and his brother shot for planning to escape.}

^{After the discovery of his mother and brother’s escape plan, Shin was held for seven months in a secret underground prison inside Camp 14. He was 13 years old.}

^{In the underground prison, guards tortured Shin over a coal fire, seeking to find out his role in the planned escape of his mother and brother.}

^{As punishment for dropping a sewing machine while working at a garment factory in the camp, guards used a knife to cut off Shin’s right middle finger at the first knuckle.}

Author Biography

Blaine Harden is a reporter for PBS Frontline and a contributor to The Economist, based in Seattle, having completed a tour as the Washington Post’s bureau chief in Tokyo. He is the prize-winning, acclaimed author of two books: Africa: Dispatches from a Fragile Continent (Norton,1990) and A River Lost: The Life and Death of the Columbia (Norton,1996).

Also by Blaine Harden

Africa: Dispatches from a Fragile Continent

A River Lost: The Life and Death of the Columbia

Copyright

First published 2012 by Viking

An imprint of Penguin, USA

First published in UK 2012 by Mantle

an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

This electronic edition published 2012 by Mantle

an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

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Basingstoke and Oxford

Associated companies throughout the world

www.panmacmillan.com

ISBN 978-0230-76118-6 EPUB

Copyright © Blaine Harden 2012

The right of Blaine Harden to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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FOOTNOTES

1

Amnesty International, ‘Images Reveal Scale of North Korean Political Prison Camps’, 3 May 2011, 1

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