North Korean Prison Camp Survivor:
Kim
Hye Sook suffered unbearable pain and emotional suffering when she was
detained for 28 years in a secretive North Korean concentration camp.
Brutal executions, starvation — even mothers killing and eating their
children to ensure their own survival — were regular occurrences.
Kim — who miraculously escaped from the Bukchang prison camp back in
2003 – granted CBN News with the first American television news
interview to discuss these horrendous conditions. She now lives in South
Korea, with the details of her escape remaining classified for security
reasons. This summer, she released a memoir entitled, “A Concentration
Camp Retold in Tears.”
When she was 13-year-old, her tragic tale began. The year was 1975
and in the blink of an eye the young girl was captured alongside her
entire family. After years of suffering, she didn’t taste freedom until
she was 41-years-old. Kim
explains:
“My entire family went to prison. Some were taken to the
mountains; others were put in different labor camps all because of my
grandfather’s one mistake: he escaped to South Korea during the Korean
War.”
Two women are watched by a North Korean guard (Photo Credit: AP)
Today, Kim wears dark glasses to ensure that her identity remains
concealed. While she lost seven family members in the re-education camp,
she currently has two sisters and a brother who are still imprisoned.
She
described a typical day at the camp:
“I attended indoctrination classes in the morning. In the
afternoon the children were sent to push trolleys in the coal mines,
often without any safety gear.
People were dying in the mines. There were numerous mine
collapses, so many injuries, people who lost their legs, many who were
buried alive. It was horrible.
I was treated like a slave and worse. I hardly slept. It
was inhuman. But I never complained. I just followed all the rules. I
had to find a way to survive.”
Kim claims that the conditions were so terrible that she thought
about committing suicide “hundreds of thousands of times” during her
28-year detention. But because there was always someone watching her,
this simply wasn’t an option:
“Each prisoner is assigned to watch four or five other
prisoners. So if anything happens, the other prisoners would alert the
guards because they didn’t want to get into trouble themselves.”
While her descriptions of executions are absolutely horrendous,
nothing is more disturbing than her memories about those individuals who
she saw kill their children in an effort to stave off hunger. In one
instance, she recalls a mother boiling her 9-year-old daughter. In
another fit of desperation, a woman killed her 16-year-old son, chopped
him up and took him to a butcher to obtain some corn in exchange.
Kim admits that these details are difficult to share, but she bravely
proclaims, “I want the world to see these images and to hear my
testimony.” In describing the conditions in the isolated
and volatile nation, she says, “I am living proof that there are no
human rights in North Korea.” In September, she was invited to
Washington, D.C., where she testified before a congressional panel about
the conditions she faced.
Watch her story, below:
