Chilling

Escaping Kim Jong-Il's Camps

Sole escapee from North Korea pens book.

Shin Dong-hyuk was born in a North Korean concentration camp. He was tortured with fire after his mother tried to escape (she was hanged) and the top of his right middle finger was chopped off after he accidentally dropped a sewing machine. His cousin was raped, a young girl was beaten to death in front of him, and he was once so hungry he scavenged for food in cow dung. Shin recounts this is in a new book called Escape to the Outside World, reported in The Washington Post. In 2005, Shin escaped the camp by using the dead body of a friend to insulate himself from the killing current of an electrified fence. Of the 14,000-plus North Korean defectors now living in South Korea, Shin is the only one known to have escaped the concentration camps, where 150,000 to 200,000 people are held.