We’ve all read accounts of the brutal gulags in what was the Soviet Union, but there have not been many that have come across the ones found in North Korea. No doubt due to what is a tightly veiled country.
I just finished an account from a man that basically grew up in one that was known as Yodok.
The book is called Aquariums in Pyongyang by Kang Chol-Kwan.
What really hit home for me is Kang and I are the same age. While I was living a relatively happy childhood, Kang was eating salamanders whole in a fight to stay alive.
Kang was sent to “Hotel Yodok” when he was about 5 years old and was released in 1987 at the age of 18.
And when I say hotel it is of course dripping in sarcasm. His family and all the others being “re-educated” did not even have barracks.
Each family was given a grass hut about the size of a broom closet. One can imagine how cold and vile the winters up in the mountains must have been for them.
Each family would be given a thin uniform that was to last 2 years if not more. Considering that they were forced to perform hard labor every day, it’s not as if the uniform could hope to last that long. Every person there was reduced to rags.
Food was not distributed. Each family had a small plot of “land” in front of their hut in which to grow their crops.
These “gardens” were for the most part barren as after performing hard labor all day one does not have it in him to maintain any sort of green thumb.
Kang did get out of this hell hole as I mention above but he left behind everyone he had ever known. His mother, his sister, his uncles, none of them were to ever see him again. Sadly, his father died shortly after their release.
Kang was able to smuggle himself out to China. He details how cautious and surprised he was while discovering China.
What we think of as a closed communist country was a free man’s paradise to Kang after what he had been through.
I have already given enough away, Kang’s story deserves to be told. Pick up the book, it’s worth the read.
P.S. If this does not format correctly that I have not fixed it on purpose. I have been fighting with the Word vs Typepad all morning and the words that are coming out of my mouth would make Nick Coleman blush. I knew blogger had this problem, but Typepad?
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