One unforgettable image, there were two girls and they were trying to take out a piece of noodle from one polluted water pond where they put the garbage. And one guard kicked the kids into the small pond, and they drowned. The pond was very deep, and I felt really sad about that.
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Former child prisoner and author Kang Chol Hwan describes how prisoners were forced to stone each other to death.
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Ahn reports that of the 1,500 to 2,000 prisoners who died each year from malnutrition alone, most were kids. This figure does not include deaths from disease, torture, execution, or from the casual murders he recollects:
I saw numerous prisoners killed, especially by beating. I saw one person age between 40 and 50 — he’s old enough because the average age of prisoner is between 40-50 — he was working in brick factory. And as he was older he was moving slowly, he was not working well. And the team master tramped on his loin, and the bone was broken. He was hit by an iron rod that is used to start vehicle engines, and I heard the next day he died.
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There’s really no telling why North Korea houses its prisoners this way, but it makes sense from the perspective of cold logic. As even the Nazis learned, camps are more secure if they’re less concentrated. Two dozen prisoners in a small village present much less of a threat of rebellion than, say, the large group of prisoners who rose up in the Onsong Camp in 1997. The uprising ended with 5,000 dead, and Kim Jong Il reportedly ordered every trace of the place scraped off the face of the earth. It’s easier to guess why prisoners are housed in huts; the camps’ main method of control is to keep inmates on the verge of starvation and extend them small rewards for informing on each other.
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One woman told of being forced to assist injection-induced labours and then watching as a baby was suffocated with a wet towel in front of its mother. Many former prisoners told of babies buried alive or left face down on the ground to die. They were told by guards this was to prevent the survival of half-Chinese babies. If fleeing North Koreans are discovered by Chinese police, they are almost always returned home.
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I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber,’ he said. ‘The parents, son and and a daughter. The parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing.’
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Camp 16, according to “The Hidden Gulag,” is a place of exile for families of the condemned. In North Korea’s Confucian society, in which every word of the late Great Leader Kim Il Sung is worshipped as holy scripture, the regime strictly obeys his order to root out class enemies for three generations. That’s why North Korea doesn’t just arrest the person who sings a South Korean pop song or makes an unguarded remark about the food supply. It arrests that person’s husband or wife, parents, and children, too.