There are six drawings in the back of this book. They’re not very good drawings. In fact they look as if they come from an unusually hamfisted comic strip. However, it’s their crudity that makes them so powerful. One shows a young boy being suspended over a coal fire, a rope round his wrists, a chain round his ankles and a hook through his abdomen.
The boy is Shin Dong-hyuk, the only person born in a North Korean labour camp ever to have escaped from one. Shin’s first memory is of being taken to see an execution aged four. He watched a man having his mouth stuffed full of pebbles in case he tried to shout out anything unpatriotic, and then shot.
The fact that Shin was born at all was due to the camp guards, who randomly paired off male and female prisoners to provide new slaves for the workforce.
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