While reading ¡°Escape from Camp 14,¡± be prepared for horrifying passages that plumb the depths of viciousness to which both the jailed and their jailers in North Korea¡¯s political prison camps descend.
Bred for a lifetime of slave labor by prison camp guards who had rewarded his lifer parents¡¯ good behavior by matching them up for marriage, a 13-year-old boy overhears his mother and his older brother plotting to flee. He immediately rats them out. Required to attend their execution, he refuses to meet his mother¡¯s gaze.
A teacher ¡ª angered that the boy has snitched not to the teacher but to a guard, thus depriving the teacher of career points with the prison bureaucracy ¡ª enlists the whole class in a months-long campaign to beat the boy bloody and starve him.
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