Escape From Camp 14 Sparknotes

Did you know that at this moment, numerous innocent prisoners are being forced to work for no pay and are held captive as punishment for crimes of their relatives? This is because of North Korea’s labor camps, also known as political prisons. In these camps, prisoners are denied all of their basic rights and are given the minimal amount of food, clothing, and other necessities. Shin Dong-hyuk was born in one of these camps, and he tells his story in his biography, Escape From Camp 14. The book talks about the horrible living conditions inside the camp. It also talks about the harsh punishments, distrust, and snitching. Of North Korea’s three social classes, the prisoners in these camps are at the bottom. Accordingly, these prisoners are treated

horribly and often disregarded as members of society.
In these labor camps, the prisoners are given a minimal amount of food, although they are required to meet a large quota every day at work. When the starving children are left at home as their parents work, they often eat their food, along with their parents’ food, never considering the consequences of this. When their parents arrived at home hungry and find no food, they beat the children with whatever they can find. The defenseless children have no way of stopping this. The prisoners are given the same meal every day: corn porridge, pickled cabbage, and cabbage soup. Could you imagine eating the exact same meal every single day for your entire life? For the prisoners in Camp 14, this is a grim reality. As a child, Shin recalls scavenging for rats, frogs, and insects, because he was starving. When Shin heard that roasted meat was available nearly everywhere outside the camp, it became a monumental motivation for him to escape. When he did escape, at age 23, he was shocked at the wide variety of food outside the camp.
Growing up in the camps, the prisoners are never given proper housing. Most of them live in a model village with forty one-story buildings, each of which houses four families. The prisoners are forced to sleep on the cold concrete floors. Electricity only runs long enough for the prisoners to get ready in the mornings and be settled in at night: from four to five a.m. and ten to eleven p.m. The houses have no running water, and all the windows are made of an opaque vinyl material. Although the buildings have no air conditioner, the rooms are heated by a coal fire in the kitchen. This is one of the only amenities provided to the prisoners in Camp 14. Thirty families live in the model village, and they all share one well for drinking water. The families also all share one privy, which is similar to a bathroom. It is divided in half: one side for women, and the other for men. The prisoners’ feces are used as fertilizer: another way the camps are degrading to the prisoners.
Another injustice of North Korean labor camps is the minimal amount of clothing that is provided to the prisoners.

They are given one outfit for them to wear every single day, that often would not be replaced until three years later. Along with the other prisoners, Shin Dong-hyuk was given one shirt, one pair of pants, and one pair of cheap, holey shoes. His mother made him socks and underwear out of rags, but after her execution he wore none. The uniforms are made by other prisoners at the camp’s garment factory out of rough, uncomfortable fabric. Shin was required to wear these garments in the camp until he was 23 years

old!
Aside from being given the bare minimum of food, clothing, and housing, the prisoners also have to worry about being put under pressure to do their jobs and meet a quota. Once prisoners reach age sixteen, they must get a permanent job. Because they're randomly assigned a job, they could be working in coal mines, a garment factory, or even a pig farm. The pig farm is considered one of the best jobs, because it gives prisoners a huge opportunity to steal a lot of food. In the garment factory, however, the prisoners have little to no opportunity to steal food. They are strictly forced to meet a large quota. If they do not meet this quota, they are given harsh punishments. One of these punishments is having to do “bitter humiliation work”. This is two extra hours spent working in the factory, usually from ten at night to midnight. Many of the workers have to do this, as the working conditions make it nearly impossible to meet the quotas. The male prisoners who were designated to be in charge of the seamstresses are very degrading to them. They beat them if they misunderstand a certain task or make a simple error. The guards tried to justify this by saying it was a way to force them to work even harder.
Another aspect of life in one of these labor camps is the family relationships and snitching. The prisoners are taught from an early age to betray and snitch on anyone and everyone who does anything that goes against the camp’s rules. For snitching, the prisoners are promised a reward of extra food rations or higher status among the prisoners. As a result, the prisoners snitch on anyone they can for anything they do. This includes their family members. When Shin heard his mother and brother planning an escape, he immediately alerted the school night guard. Because the first rule of camp 14 states, “Groups of two or more are prohibited from assembling to devise a plot or to attempt to escape”, Shin’s mother and brother were executed. The nightguard accepted full credit for discovering their plans, so Shin was taken to an underground interrogation room. The guards there assumed that Shin was an accomplice to the escape planning. They tortured him by holding him over a tub full of burning charcoal and burning the skin on his lower back. On a different day, they tied him to the ceiling by his feet and left him hanging, upside down, for almost the entire day. He was held in the underground prison for around seven months, spent mostly in isolation. These are only a few of the torturing methods North Korean labor camp guards use on their prisoners.
Another injustice of the North Korean labor camps is the school for the children.

The prisoners are denied a proper education. Instead, they are taught about the camp rules and being loyal to the government. Shin had three teachers throughout his life, and he never knew any of their names. Because the camp guards are also the teachers, they are very strict and harsh to their students. They are focused only on teaching the students to be loyal to the government, no matter what, so they do not develop personal relationships with their students. The students are not even allowed to make eye contact with the teachers or ask any questions. In Escape From Camp 14, Shin tells about how one six year old girl had stolen corn found in her bag. The teacher immediately beat her to death with a chalkboard pointer, all while the entire class was watching. Although the students were treated horrendously, they soon learned not to be querulous, as one child had to learn from experience. When he smarted off to the teacher, he was tied to a tree and beat by all the other

kids.
There are numerous other examples of the injustices of living in the North Korean labor camps. The prisoners are inhumanely starved and given brutal punishments. They are taught from birth to be loyal to these horrible prisons, and they grow up knowing that they will never live their lives freely or even look past the walls of the camp. Most will be worked to death and eventually die there, but a few will escape. This is a very sad truth for many of the victims of these camps, and the existence of these camps need to be made known around the world.