North Korean escapee compares work camps to Auschwitz
Kang Chol-hwan says prison inmates forced to watch executions, physically abused and tortured
A man who was jailed in North Korea at age nine and stayed in a concentration camp in the country for a decade has compared conditions in the dictatorship’s prisons to the Auschwitz death camp.
Kang Chol-hwan was imprisoned at Yodok concentration camp after his grandfather was accused of being a traitor.
After his release, Kang escaped from North Korea to the South, where he lives now.
According to the UK paper The Independent, he now campaigns for human rights and runs a group that smuggles USB sticks into the North to inform citizens about the world outside.
Kang recently answered questions about life in the camp on Reddit.
“Daily life in the work camps is very mundane,” he said. “We woke up at 5am and were forced to work until sunset.”
Sometimes, Kang wrote, inmates “were forced to watch public executions. We were physically abused — hit and tortured.
“I think of it as another form of Auschwitz,” he wrote.
“These work camps are like products of Nazism, and an abusive government needs elements such as Nazi concentration camps. They just have different ways of killing people.”
He also explained how repressive North Korean life was not inducive to personal development and creativity.
“Because people’s lives are governed within the authority’s rules and communal lifestyle, having personal hobbies or showing personal preference is a shortcut to the prison camp,” he said.
Of his experiences upon leaving the reclusive country, Kang said “everything was a shock. The fact that I could travel whenever I wanted was shocking.”
He added that women’s rights in the two countries are so different. “In North Korea, women are often treated harshly, but in South Korea, I saw women smoking, which is unimaginable in the North.”