Frightening tale of the closed state of North Korea

books:


	• The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag Chol-hwan Kang, Pierre Rigoulot Basic Books, 2005 - 272 pages average customer review:based on 50 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A Chilling Story, Compellingly Told

Abject stories of horror are difficult to take in. We sometimes turn aside when reading the horror because our minds find it hard to digest the bleak facts.

While this book is filled with horrors -- families torn asunder, abuse of pregnant women, torture by prison guards, among many other recountings -- the story is still told with humanity and grace, and ultimately ends with hope, if not happiness.

The story of such regimes as North Korea must be told. And because we are inclined to forget, the story must be told over and over, so that we are not fooled by the lies of the North, the excuses made by the North's apologists, and the occasional public smiles of Kim Jong-il.

This is a well-written, engaging story. I don't easily rate an item with 5 stars, but this deserves the 5 and more.

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Difficult to Imagine

This book is a "must read" for anyone conerned about personal freedoms and human rights. What the author has endured is unspeakable in any kind of civilized society. The detailed description of the concentration camp and it's workings will mesmerize the reader and then numb the senses. Why do the the Korean people tolerate this treatment of their citizens? Truly, Stalinism is alive and well in north Korea.

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"In a Concentration Camp at the Age of Nine."

"You people don't deserve to live, but the Party and our Great Leader have given you a chance to redeem yourselves. Don't squander it and disappoint him." So says a guard in Yodok, the place which is featured in this book. It was identified as "Border Patrol of the Korean People, unit 2915," however, as the North Korean regime sought to disguise it's real purpose. Kang Chol-Hwan arrived at its gate at age nine, along with his sister, father, and grandmother. As the author states herein, "We weren't sent to the camp as criminals but as relatives of a criminal." That so-called"criminal" was his grandfather and the charge leveled against his grandfather was "a crime of high treason." The real reason that Kang Chol-Hwan's grandfather was arrested, however, was that the North Korean police state, having duped his grandfather into returning to Korea with the fortune he accumulated in Japan, no longer had any need of him once they had got their hands on his wealth. This book is replete with examples of many other well-off Koreans, also inspired by revolutionary propaganda, who likewise left comfortable lives in Japan hoping to contribute to building communism in Kim Il-sung's Korea, but who, instead, were fleeced of their assets and wound up spending time in places like Yodok, one of the "Aquariums of Pyongyang."

The author, though, tells us almost nothing about any concentration/work camp/slave labor camp other than Yodok, the place where he was imprisoned for ten years. So the book is really about one "Aquarium" (and he utilizes the term because he actually brought his fish bowl with him to this prison, as well as attempting to coin a Korean phrase reminiscent of the Gulag Archipelago).

The first 148 pages of this rather brief book concerns the author's first 8 years at Yodok. He discusses how he was forced to trap rats for food, how his fellow political prisoners were kept in rags, denied adequate food; how they were worked to exhaustion. He also describes the execution of some prisoners: "The Party was willing to forgive this criminal. It gave him the chance here at Yodak to right himself. He chose to betray the Party's trust, and for that he merits execution." The man supposedly betrayed the state by trying to escape from his slave-labor camp. Moments later the commanding officer directed his guards thusly: "Aim at the traitor of the Fatherland...Fire!" So much for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

After telling us about his first 8 years in the camp, the author admits this: "As the years passed, another feeling began to disturb my daily existence: the feeling of injustice, which grew sharper when I considered the discrepancy between everything I had been taught and all that I was living." The writing herein, unfortunately, is a lot like this; not particularly personal and bereft of much emotion. (Maybe this has something to do with the fact that the author told his story to a French journalist---whose name appears on the cover of this book---and the book was originally published in French, perhaps having lost something through two translations.)

The final two years the author spent in Yodok's labor prison are glossed over in 6 pages, then his escape to South Korea, via China, is addressed in the final 40 or so pages. In total the book only numbers 238 (rather large print) pages and there's no index. I wish there was a lot more to this book; more about how many places such as Yodok exist in North Korea, how many people might be incarcerated in them and the like, and more of the minute detail of goings-on in such places (as opposed to the broader brush strokes offered by our author herein) so as to be better able to "feel" what it must have been like for the author to survive 10 years in such a ghastly place. (07Dec) Cheers

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A heartwrenching story of survival

Not since Night (Oprah's Book Club) by Elie Wiesel have I read such a grippng story of a child's survival in the face of unspeakable cruelty & human suffering. Kang Chol-Hwan spent ten years in North Korea's infamous Yodok prison camp. After an alledged infidelity to communist party ideals by his grandfather, Chol-Hwan and his family were sent to the camp in the late 1970s when the boy was only nine years old. There he witnessed torture, suffering & death on a daily basis; seeing neighbors starve to death was a commonplace occurence. The courage & will to survive displayed by Kang Chol-Hwan in the face of such unimaginable horror is remarkable, although the experience did leave lasting emotional scars:

"I think the camp also changed me psychologically. As a child, I was outgoing and restless. When people meet me today, they find me reserved & somewhat distant. Growing up in the camp made me shut myself off from the world. I learned about suffering and hunger, violence and murder. For a long time I was angry at my grandfather. Only around 1983 did I begin to realize that not he but rather Kim Il-Sung and his regime were the real causes of my suffering. They were the ones responsible for the camp and for filling it with innocent people. All during my childhood, Kim Il-Sung had been like a god to me. A few years in the camp cured me of my faith. My fellow prisoners and I were the wayward sheep of the revolution, and the Party's way of bringing us back into the fold was to exploit us unto death. The propoganda, which exalted North Korea as the people's corner of paradise, now struck me as revolting."

This book should be read by everyone who needs to be reminded how fragile human rights & personal freedom can be in the face unchecked evil. "The Aquariums of Pyongyang" is destined to become a classic story of the struggle for justice and human dignity. This is a very touching book that cannot possibly leave a reader unmoved. The images created by this book will remain with me for a very long time.

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Frightening tale of the closed state of North Korea

This and Google Earth are pretty much your only looks into North Korea. A country we should all know more about with its nuclear weapons, and with the hard-to-understand reactor construction in Syria. Connections to Pakistan's nuclear program? There's a lot that would be good to understand. This book might help us a bit.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

North Korea is today one of the last bastions of hard-line Communism. Its leaders have kept a tight grasp on their one-party regime, quashing any nascent opposition movements and sending all suspected dissidents to its brutal concentration camps for "re-education." Kang Chol-hwan is the first survivor of one of these camps to escape and tell his story to the world, documenting the extreme conditions in these gulags and providing a personal insight into life in North Korea. Part horror story, part historical document, part memoir, part political tract, this record of one man's suffering gives eyewitness proof to an ongoing sorrowful chapter of modern history. New edition with a new preface by the author.

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