Shin believes another prisoner who attempted to escape with him died in the attempt. The last he saw of him was his body hung up on the wire. After wandering alone for 20 days, living off stolen food, he waded across the shallow Tumen River into China last January. His growth stunted by the diet of corn and cabbage on which he grew up working from dawn to dusk in fields and workshops, shows a hand revealing a finger cut off as punishment for dropping a load he was carrying in a factory. He does not reveal still more scars where he was beaten regularly and then, at 14, stretched over burning charcoal, a hook stuck into his groin, while interrogators ordered him to say what he knew about what they claimed had been an escape attempt by his mother and older brother.

After seven months in to an underground cell on a near-starvation diet, sharing food with an emaciated prisoner who had been in the same cell for 20 years, he was led one day to an execution ground, told to sit in the first row beside his father and then watched the tears flow down his father's face as his mother was hanged and his brother shot by a military firing squad. Shin did not know, until his interrogation began, that his father's crime had been to have had two brothers accused of siding with South Korea in the Korean War. His father and mother had met in the camp when they were introduced by a camp official, told they would marry as a reward for their labor and then given five days to stay with each other while still going to work every day.

Shin tells his story in a new book published here in Korean, "Escape to the Outside World," the most gruesome of several accounts by defectors of the horrors of a gulag system to which about 200,000 North Koreans are consigned for political crimes committed either by themselves or their relatives. Shin began writing the book, published by the North Korean Human Rights Database Center in Seoul, during six months that he spent in the South Korean consulate in Shanghai, which he reached after a year working at a logging camp, hiding out from Chinese police who he knew would return him to certain death in North Korea if they picked him up.

South Korean diplomats had to negotiate with the Chinese to fly him out and bring him to the South, where nearly 12,000 North Korean defectors have found safe haven over the past decade.

As for Shin, he had no knowledge of the outside world -- or even of life in North Korea -- during his years in the camp. Prisoners were never told Pyongyang was the capital or that Kim Il-sung had been the country's "Great Leader" for nearly 50 years before dying in 1994, passing on power to his son, Kim Jong-il. He got an idea of the world beyond after befriending a new prisoner who had traveled to foreign countries before falling afoul of the system. "I should have reported him to authorities, but I was anxious to learn more stories. My motivation was curiosity. We decided to run away from the camp."

The moment came when they were cutting wood in the mountains. "We were very close to the barbed wire, and the day was nearly over. It was getting darker. This was our only chance." at dusk, he and his friend made their break -- he getting through the strands of wire, enduring severe shocks while his friend was electrocuted." I cannot realize now I'm in South Korea," he says. "That's why I wrote my book. I want to know, if our parents committed crimes, why the innocent children? I want to inform the world about them. Now, for the children in the camp, I wish to speak for them."

Shin's story stands as a rebuke of President Roh Moo-hyun for failing to raise the issue of human rights when he had the chance last month at his summit with Kim Jong-il. "My sense is conditions of life in North Korea are essentially unchanged," says Tim Peters, director of Helping Hands Korea, dedicated to assisting North Korean defectors on their journey here and then to working with them on the transition to life in a hard-driving capitalist society. "The regime keeps its grip, and everything is still tight." As for Shin, says Peters, "his testimony is living proof we should be talking not about human rights but about crimes against humanity."

Donald Kirk, Journalist and Author

November 17, 2007