Meeting Shin Dong-hyuk

‘I did not know about sympathy or sadness. They educated us from birth so that we were not capable of normal human emotions. Now that I am out, I am learning to be emotional. I feel like I am becoming human.’

You may have heard of Shin Dong-hyuk, the man who feels he is becoming human. He is the only person born in a North Korean concentration camp to have escaped to the West. He was 23 when he fled. Ten years before, he betrayed his mother and older brother’s escape plans to a camp guard in the hope of winning favour. He was pleased when they were executed, pleased that a threat to his safety had been eliminated. North Korea breeds children like Shin.

Shin walks into the smart lobby of the Bloomsbury Hotel in London, where I am interviewing Blaine Harden, the veteran foreign correspondent who has recorded Shin’s story in Escape