Escapee Tells of Horrors in North Korean Prison Camp

Shin recovered in a cell with the help of a sickly older man who gave him half his food ration. Months later, when Shin walked out of the underground cell to the public square, he was joined by his father.

"When I saw that place, I thought my father and I would be executed," Shin said in the interview.

Instead, to his surprise, he became a spectator. His mother and brother were brought to the square.

Watching his mother being hanged, Shin recalls, he was relieved it was her, not him.

"I felt she deserved to die," he said. "I was full of anger for the torture that I went through. I still am angry at her."

Nine years later, Shin escaped. He was working in the camp's garment factory with an older prisoner who had seen the outside world and wanted to see it again. When they were collecting wood in a mountainous corner of the camp on Jan. 2, 2005, the two ran to an electrified barbed-wire fence. His friend got hung up and died in the fence; Shin stepped on his body and managed to get through.

"I could afford little thought for my poor friend and I was just overwhelmed by joy," he writes of his first moments beyond the fence.

He broke into a nearby house, where he stole clothes and rice. He sold some of the rice for cash and made his way north to the border with China. There, he bribed guards with cigarettes and ran across the frozen Tumen River. Shin says he is still amazed that he got out.

"I think God was helping me," he said.

Here in South Korea, Shin sometimes goes to church on Sundays. "I go to the church, but I don't really understand the words or the concepts," he said.

The concept of forgiveness is especially difficult for him to grasp. In Camp No. 14, he said, to ask for forgiveness was "to beg not to be punished."

Shin could not find his uncles in South Korea. He searched for them for a while, then gave up. He no longer has nightmares and sleeps soundly through the night. There is, however, a new kind of misery.