camp 14 kaechon
about
Kaechon political prison camp 14 is about 60 square miles in area, and every prisoner, about 15000, are serving life sentences, some are even subject to the three generations punishment, where everyone in your family is imprisoned for the next 2 generations. It is across the river from the Pukchang political prison camp
quotes
“[A]bout twice a week, [the guards] would choose one kid and do the inspection to see if this person is stealing something or hiding something, but she was so unlucky that she was chosen as the kid to be inspected. And, in her pocket there were some grains and then the guard asked where she got it. Then, she told the guard that she picked them up on the street. There was a wooden stick that the guards used. And, the guard says that’s not the way I taught you, so you went against my teaching. So, she was beaten so badly that she fainted, and we had to take her to her mom. When she didn’t come to school the next day, we learned that she had died.” – Shin Dong-hyuk
“The guard told the floor manager to cut off my finger, so got on my knees and I begged not to do so but that didn’t work obviously. And, I thought my whole hand was going to cut off, but it was just a finger. So, at that time I was grateful, really grateful to the guard because I was only losing a finger instead of a hand.” – Shin Dong Hyuk
“I was born a criminal and I would die a criminal that was my fate … Where I lived only two kinds of people existed, the guards who had guns and the people who are inmates wearing uniforms. Inmates were born inmates, so we lived like inmates; that was our fate... Nobody taught us that way but that was all that we could see… so that’s how we lived.” – Shin Dong Hyuk