Shin dong hyuk father of the bride
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Shin Dong-hyuk
Twenty-seven years ago, Shin Dong-hyuk was born inside Camp 14, one of five sprawling political prisons in the mountains of North Korea. Located about 55 miles north of Pyongyang, the labor camp is a ‘complete control district,’ a no-exit prison where the only sentence is life.
No one born in Camp 14 or in any North Korean political prison camp has escaped. No one except Shin. This is his story.
A gripping, terrifying memoir with a searing sense of place, ESCAPE FROM CAMP 14 will unlock, through Shin, a dark and secret nation, taking readers to a place they have never before been allowed to go.
‘This is a story unlike any other’ Barbara Demick, author of Nothing toEnvy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
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This extraordinary story lifts the lid on the secretive and brutal totalitarian regime of North Korean ‘s labour camps and the forgotten political prisoners and their families whom are destined too suffer unbelievable inhumanity and are subject to summary execution at the whims of their “guards”.
Shin Dong-hyuk ‘s story appalled and horrified me
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What sets North and South Korea apart?
“I used to think we were all one people with the same language and lots in common. That’s why I left North Korea. But then I realized that everything is different here,” says Ka-yeon in our Life Links episode #WhoAmI. Ka-yeon fled the crippling poverty of her home nation for a better life in South Korea. But now she feels caught between two worlds. Despite many similarities, the two sides of the Korean peninsula are poles apart.
A little history - how the split happened
In the last days of World War Two, when it became clear Japan would surrender to the Allied powers, the question of what would happen to Korea became louder than ever. After decades of occupying the Korean peninsula, Japan had retreated. The United States and Soviet Union agreed to divide Korea at the 38th parallel in August 1945, with the US taking the southern part and the Soviet Union the north.
The plan was to hand back control to the Koreans and withdraw, and in 1948 several attempts were made at getting the nations to vote for reunification.
But the distrust engendered by a few years of opposing ideologies had grown too deep. What started as an almost "accidental division" gave rise to one of the most hostile and heavily militarized borders in the worl
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