Camp 14: Total Control Zone

I still suffer from nightmares.

It's better than the

beginning of my stay here.

But I still have nightmares.

It's not as bad as used to be.

It's become part of my every day life.

I try to ignore the nightmares.

I'm resting, so I don't

have to do other things.

I'm sitting in the room without

thoughts and without doing anything.

This helps me kill time.

I don't want to think about anything.

Many people have called me recently,

they ask me to tell my story

but I politely refuse.

I often feel very tired and exhausted.

That's why I say no to such requests.

Of course if I think about

it I could do a lot.

Maybe it's hard for others to comprehend

the outside world was inconceivable to me.

I had never seen the world on

the other side of defence.

I had an idea that there was a country

of North Korea and a bigger world

but I thought that world would

be exactly like the labour camp.

I couldn't conceive of anything else.

I started with forced

labour when I was six.

When I started in school.

I was just a little boy.

The children went into the

mines and push the wagons out.

The adults had loaded with them coal

and we gather all the coal that

had fall out to the ground.

CAMP 14

TOTAL CONTROL ZONE

What did the terrain

behind the camp look like?

There was a long mountain range.

Was there anything on top of the hills?

Yes, a barbed wire fence.

This was the guards' village.

It had an extra fence around it.

Their own village with a fence.

A secured area in a secure camp.

That sounds crazy.

Were the guards scared of revolts?

That was the coal mine.

This is where the prisoners lived.

That's where I lived with my mother.

I lived with my mother in a

small house in the camp.

There was just one room and we slept there.

This was also the kitchen.

There was no furniture. We had no

options but to sleep on the concrete floor.

In the wintertime we put on

as many clothes as possible.

The picture of the camp is almost finished.

Where did the public executions take place?

Here, in a perfectly ordinary field.

The victims were tied to posts.

They faced the river.

Shin, what is your first

memory as a kid in the camp?

It's nothing special.

There's no particular

event that I remember.

Or maybe yes, when I went to a

public executions with my mother.

I was very young, maybe four

years old. That was the first time.

I remember the poster about the execution.

There was always a poster that announce

the day and the time the executions take place.

Several thousands spectators

came to the executions.

Except for the inmates who had to work

all the prisoners were forced

to appear at these executions.

After the accused had been

tied to the post with a rope

a guard or someone higher-up came and said

the prisoners had to work hard

to serve their sentences.

These inmates hadn't work hard

and they hadn't been obedient.

That's why they would been executed.

Immediately after this declaration

they were shot with machine guns.

When the shots were fired I panicked, That is

my first memory of my childhood in the camp.

I have a cold. That's why I don't really have an appetite. Oh-Young-Nam ex

officer secret police service ministry of internal security, North Korea

I haven't been sleeping well either.

That's why it's really hard for me.

I knew yesterday that I needed to go to bed early

for the interview today but I didn't sleep well.

Kwon Hyuk

ex commander of the guards

Camp 22, North Korea

Can I make myself

comfortable on this chair?

It doesn't take much to be

arrested in North Korea.

In the North Korean system you're

arrested if you name the leaders

Kim Il-Sung and King Jong-Il without

using the address 'Tongji, comrade'.

That'll land you in a camp.

In North Korea people smoke by filling

the papers with loose tobacco.

Since there isn't enough

paper for these cigarettes

some people use the "Rodong

Workers Newspaper" instead.

They're sent to a camp because

they failed to notice

that newspaper contained a portrait

of the leader Kim Il-Sung.

We never did the arrests during the day.

That was always at night, in secret,

without the neighbours noticing.

The arrested individuals weren't allowed

to take anything with them.

If an entire family was brought

to a camp for political prisoners

the family members had no idea why they

had even been sent to prison camp.

Often only the accused did know the reason.

The rule in the prison camp

is that the arrested family

is never allowed to be together again.

Authentic footage of a police interrogation in North Korea,

smuggled out of the country by a human rights organization.

After being deported to a labour camp,

you're not treated as human beings anymore.

You're treated like animals.

We, the guards, screamed at them: "At least

as pigs you would have been of use!"

In the camp the life of an inmate

is worthless than the life of a worm.

They can't defend themselves,

not even when they're being beaten.

I could do anything with the

prisoners that I felt like.

The decision whether to kill them or let

them live was completely up to me.

It's a shame that I can

only see my home from afar.

But at the border I can be a

little closer to North Korea.

I can at least see my home,

even though from afar.

My home is over there.

It's North Korea.

When I arrived in South Korea I was

picked up from the airport in Seoul.

I was interrogated by the

secret service for weeks.

They checked my statements.

I had to take lie detect to tests.

These investigators are experts.

They know all about labour camps

in North Korea in details.

You can't tell them any lies.

They are perfectly informed.

When North Korean refugees come to South

Korea they check who the refugees are.

I had to make a sworn written statement

that I would never talk about the

contents of these interrogations.

The only food in the camp was

maize and Chinese cabbage soup.

Three times a day for

twelve months of the year.

Always the same food.

If you made a mistake you were

only given half as punishment.

They only got a single spoonful.

The guards decided that under own.

It was far too little.

We were always starving.

We only ate meat when we caught rats.

When a rat got into the room we

closed all the doors and killed it.

Then we quickly held it in the

fire to burn off the hairs.

Then we skinned and gutted it.

Then we cooked it in the fire and ate it.

There no was special method.

Rats have soft bones

so we ate absolutely everything

including the bones.

You could assume that

the inmates would say:

"So what, if we get

killed, we'll just die."

But that's not true.

The inmates in the camp feel a greater

desire to live than before.

They want to survive by all means possible.

Simply put:
if you want to

survive in the camp, you have to obey.

Otherwise you'll be killed.

Private footage of Camp 22,

filmed by Commander Kwon Hyuk

The five rules and regulations

of the labour camp:

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